Wall Street is about to launch a new way to trade professional athletes the way you trade stocks. A piece of Tiger, anyone?
When financial historians look back and ask why it took Wall Street so long to create the first public stock market that trades in professional athletes, they will see ours as an age of creative ferment. They'll see a new, extremely well-financed company in Silicon Valley that, for the moment, sells itself as a fantasy sports site but aims to become, as its co-founder Mike Kerns puts it, “the first real stock market in athletes.” And they'll find, in the bowels of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an application from a cryptic entity called A.S.A. Sports Exchange containing a description of a design for just such a market: The athlete would sell 20 percent of all future on-field or on-court earnings to a trust, which would, in turn, sell securities to the public. They'll also single out the birth of the first European hedge fund that runs a multimillion-dollar portfolio of professional soccer players, the value of which rises and falls with the players' performances.
When financial historians look back and ask why it took Wall Street so long to create the first public stock market that trades in professional athletes, they will see ours as an age of creative ferment. They'll see a new, extremely well-financed company in Silicon Valley that, for the moment, sells itself as a fantasy sports site but aims to become, as its co-founder Mike Kerns puts it, “the first real stock market in athletes.” And they'll find, in the bowels of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an application from a cryptic entity called A.S.A. Sports Exchange containing a description of a design for just such a market: The athlete would sell 20 percent of all future on-field or on-court earnings to a trust, which would, in turn, sell securities to the public. They'll also single out the birth of the first European hedge fund that runs a multimillion-dollar portfolio of professional soccer players, the value of which rises and falls with the players' performances.
