Susquehanna International Group has always embraced game theory, taking employees to baseball games and using poker as a tool for teaching its traders. Now the U.S. firm is betting that gambling on sports could be its next winning investment strategy.Susquehanna has set up a unit at its Dublin office to wager on sports including basketball, American football, soccer and tennis. The business, called Nellie Analytics, has advertised to hire quantitative analysts and computer technicians. The team already includes an ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. convertible-bond trader as well as a former wine trader who’s also played professional poker.
“We felt that our market-making background could be conducive to sports trading because the challenges of analyzing large amounts of data in real time is a core competency of ours,” said David Pollard, Susquehanna’s head of strategic planning and special counsel in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. “Although trading volumes for U.S. sports on European betting exchanges are not currently significant, sports trading seemed like a good domain to extend what we do in other markets, and we’ll see if the trading volume materializes.”
