ELI5 why it's better for you to place a $10,000 bet that, say, GOOG falls below $300 by February 2028, than to bet the same that the Pats win the Super Bowl? They're both gambling.
1. When you "lose" shorting a stock your potential loss is infinite, because you might be on the hook to buy (and then give away) GOOG at an arbitrarily high price. In contrast, the super-bowl bet is probably a fixed amount.
2. In the opposite direction, it's hard to see how the Super Bowl bet can really be hedging to reduce how much you're relying on chance in your life... not unless you happen to own a store selling single-team merchandise and you want to limit how much money you might lose if nobody wants to buy it.
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P.S.: Let's flip it around: If we assume shorting GOOG is the same as sports-gambling, then why (AFAIK) has no bookie or casino ever even tried to offer the same kind of bet, where you get $X now but you're obligated to supply $THING later?
Does that absence tell us something about an important difference between them?
This part rings true partially though: "hedging to reduce how much you're relying on chance in your life" ... so you're saying that it's bad for society when people rely very much on chance in their life?
Is it the proper role of the government though, to put people in jail because they relied on chance too much in their life? Because that's what gambling bans amount to. And on top of everything, these exact same governments (including New York!) purport to "help" society by banning gambling, while still selling lottery tickets themselves.
The thing that I suspect you're intending to describe, a put option expiring in January 2028 (there is no such contract for February) with a break-even at $300, has a different structure which greatly increases its utility for financial purposes and greatly decreases its appeal for gambling. It's hard for a casual bettor to even identify what the correct product is (it was the $355 strike at close of market today, but it may be different tomorrow!), bets are only accepted in increments of $5,500, and your winnings may be minimal unless Google falls either more quickly or more severely. If I'm trying to hedge my Google exposure, though, I'm perfectly happy with the scenario where I didn't win much because Google didn't go down much.
Unfortunately, when trading a lot at negative expected value, the outcomes converge...
There's no equivalent instrument for sports.
If I'm holding GOOG shares, I can buy puts to protect my downside risk (that's the hedge).
Options on the sports team's parent company. I mean you want to hedge against financial losses due to on-field performance but also commercial performance, right? What is the utility of hedging purely against on-field performance?
Sure, but those are also the only kind where buying options to hedge losses makes sense. For privately owned teams, only the owner(s) ha(s|ve) any reason to try to hedge losses. They can buy some kind of "missed the playoffs" insurance, if anyone will sell it. Mostly though it's part of the game and they just deal with.
> On field performance has little to do with financial gains/losses outside of gambling.
Turning sporting outcomes into derivatives doesn't make it "not gambling" just because you say "but muh hedging strategy". On-field performance impacts commercial appeal and revenue. But ultimately hedging is about covering negative financial impacts, not betting on sporting outcomes. I think we're in agreement on this.
I suppose with Kalshi etc. they can today but "insurance" is just another word for 'betting whatever bad thing will happen.' So if an owner bought any kind of insurance that paid them if they performed poorly, I would assume they were going to do things to intentionally degrade their team's performance, and would hope the league would recognize this as extreme moral hazard and kick them out of the league.
It's the same as the CEO of a public company buying puts on their company's stock. I agree "derivatives" is a feeble excuse for sports betting.