A League of Their Own: A new London-based hedge fund is making history by betting on sports

Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Tony Woodhams gets annoyed when people suggest he's a gambler. "What you saw happening on Wall Street the past few years—that was gambling," says Woodhams, the managing director of an upstart London-based hedge fund, Galileo, that partakes in exactly the sorts of activities many would consider gambling. Every week, Galileo bets on thousands of sports games. According to Woodhams, however, his hedge fund is merely acting like any other, "spreading out the risk and only wagering on matches where we feel we have a competitive advantage."

The Galileo Managed Sports Fund, which launched in April under the umbrella of the nine-year-old Centaur Group, is the world's first sports-betting hedge fund. The idea has been knocking around for a while. Six years ago, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Assn.'s Dallas Mavericks, proposed a similar fund, only to see his idea crash on the shoals of American prohibitionism. While the NBA forbids anyone involved with the league from betting on its games, there was a larger problem: Outside of Nevada, Delaware, and Oregon, betting on sports is largely illegal.