Turn Around, Look at Me

October may be the best month of the year if you're a sports fan. NFL and college football are in full swing. Baseball season winds down with the playoffs and World Series. Hockey and NBA leagues are just getting started. That's my reality TV. No politics, no real housewives, no Kardashians. What more can you ask for? This weekend was bittersweet because although my New York Football Giants were annihilated by the Patriots, The Eagles and Cowboys lost, too. We're still only one game out of first place in the division. Thought the Giants would cover, being sixteen and a half point underdogs, but the Patriots still beat the spread. Shows you how much I know and I've been following the NFL since the Jets demolished the Colts in Super Bowl III.

I read a book, Smart Sports Betting, by Matt Rudinitsky. It's actually more like a booklet at 110 pages. Out of print now, but sells for $27 on Amazon. Probably because it's endorsed by ESPN betting journalist David Purdum. He appears frequently on "Daily Wager", ESPN's sports betting information program. Should have hung onto my copy. One statistic the author highlighted is that even a professional sports bettor will win only 55% of all wagers. That means you're losing 45% of the time. A thin margin and that's if you're a pro. Amateurs don't stand a chance. Plus, it's generally known that 95-99% of sports bettors lose money long-term. What the evangelicals call degenerate gamblers. Yet, the sports wagering industry is as big as it's ever been and getting larger.

The book also emphasized that the sports betting market is very much like the stock market. Below are paraphrased statements by Purdum on the parallels of the two:

• They incorporate everything that is public knowledge.
• They incorporate the thoughts of all professional bettors (the "hot" money, i.e., private knowledge).
• They incorporate the thoughts of many ridiculously complicated algorithms.

I believe the operative phrase from that short list is 'ridiculously complicated algorithms'. However, some algos are good. If it wasn't for the acceleration in the development of gyroscopes, cameras, semiconductors, and algos, we wouldn't have vertical touchdowns for SpaceX rockets. That said, predictive text is one step away from finishing my thoughts. Deep-Data Integration. Digital Performance Marketing. Individualized Performance Advertising. These are the current corporate terms used to describe ad targeting firms such as Criteo. Their computer science is the creepy, but useful cyber stalking technology that enables advertisers to bombard you with personalized advertisements wherever you go on the Internet. Mobile and desktop. They do this by dynamically matching your recent Web browsing history via cookies with predictive software algorithms.

For example, shop for laptops on an e-commerce site like Amazon, and you'll spend the rest of your browsing session looking at banner ads highlighting Amazon's best available computer wherever you go in cyberspace.

There is someone walking behind you
Turn around, look at me
There is someone watching your footsteps
Turn around, look at me

That's from The Vogues back in the 1960's. I always thought it would be a great intro to a stalker movie. However, I digress. The sophisticated technology relies on programmatic buying for relevant consumer options that benefit the advertisers as well. Programmatic advertising is the real time automated bidding, buying and placement of banner ads. Google, Amazon, and Yahoo do this, too. They're all in bed with each other. Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II is famous for saying: "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.".

We're not quite in Fahrenheit 451, or The Handmaid's Tale era yet, but it's creeping up on us. The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence is everywhere including your stock portfolio. It's so pervasive now that saying you have A.I. in your investments is like saying you've got corn in your Cornflakes. Digirarti guru Mark Cuban believes technological advancement in the next ten years will be swifter than the last thirty years with A.I. being one of the main catalysts. An oligopoly has formed in the A.I. arena. The same Internet companies we've come to depend on for our everyday technology needs devour smaller startups. The Google and Amazon of 15 years ago are no longer mom and pop shops. They are the IBM and AT&T of the 1950's, if not the Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1900. The Gilded Age redux. This ain't no picnic.