Sports and Business News: Wednesday June 10th

BETZ ETF a Sign of Sports Gambling Popularity Among Millenials 

There has been a massive increase in states legalizing sports gambling ever since the Supreme Court’s decision to lift the federal ban in 2018. Since the ruling, 17 states have already approved its legalization and there’s about a dozen other states who plan to vote it into law. Wall Street is certainly taking note of the growing sports gambling trend.

In the last six weeks we’ve seen DraftKings go public and casino and sportsbook stocks like Penn National Gaming, MGM, and WYNN all see a big boost with the news of casinos reopening and sports coming back on the schedule.

Just last week, a sports betting ETF by RoundHill Investments, which trades under BETZ hit the stock market and quickly gained a lot of interest from investors on Robinhood. In fact, on June 5th it was the most added asset on Robinhood according to RobinTrack.

With the NBA and NHL set to resume their season in July and the NFL scheduled to kick-off in September, sportsbooks will see a heavy return of action after gamblers essentially took the last three months off due to the lack of sports. 

The Roundhill Sports Betting and iGaming ETF (exchange traded fund) is currently trading around $15.89, and the stock's high was $17.39. As of yesterday, per RobinTrack, around 18,000 users on Robinhood are invested in the stock.

MLS set to Return with World Cup Style Format

Major League Soccer is ready to resume their season. The MLS took to twitter to announce they are back with the season kicking off again on July 8th from Disney World’s Wide World of Sports Complex; also the home to the NBA when it resumes the season on July 31st.

The MLS is adopting a World Cup type format to play out their season. 

Group stage starts on July 8th with three games per club. 26 teams make up six groups. The top two teams in each group and the four best third-place teams advance to the knockout round. The Round of 16 starts on July 25, Quarterfinals on July 30th, Semis on August 5th, and the final on August 11th. The winner earns a league spot in the 2021 CONCACAF Champions League.

The MLS also released their coronavirus safety guidelines which include COVID-19 testing, temperature screenings, and of course, social distancing. 

Daily Business Update

There are 7.2 million cases of the virus worldwide, with over 412,000 deaths. 

The U.S. has 1.98 million cases of the coronavirus, with over 112,000 deaths. 

Yesterday, during our joint-segment, we covered the hospitalizations and positive case counts in Texas by comparing the case count on the Department of State Health Services to the databases done by Johns Hopkins and the New York Times and the COVID-19 Tracking Project, housed on The Atlantic. This brings the total number of cases in Texas to around 77,000 to 79,000--depending on the database you’re looking at. 

As of Wednesday, Texas health authorities say that there are 2,153 people with COVID-19 in hospitals in the state. That’s up from 2,056 yesterday. 

Texas relaxed its stay-at-home orders and started reopening back on May 1. And it’s important to note that these case counts are starting to rise following the two week period after the Memorial Day weekend. This time period was when experts warned that we could see a rise in cases due to the lack of practicing social distancing.