Sports betting is the favorite entertainment of many people. However, bookmakers are reportedly more skilled at predicting game outcomes than bettors, and betting markets are therefore extraordinarily efficient. Betting shops’ wide spreads are an additional obstacle. This means that it is exceptionally hard to beat the house in this game.

But one remarkable academic study shows that there are inefficiencies in publicly listed soccer clubs’ stocks, which can be exploited. Investors systematically overvalue stocks before important matches as they believe in positive outcomes. Teams often draw or lose a game, and stocks incur negative returns. A complicated variant of this strategy (not stated in this version, but theoretically feasible) could be created by using booking shops to hedge equity market transactions.

The academic paper postulates that an important reason for the stock market’s apparent inefficient response to soccer game results is the systematic bias in investors’ beliefs about the probability distribution of match outcomes. Bookmaker odds are compiled by a small group of experts and do not reflect investors’ subjective beliefs, while equity prices do so.