The Super Bowl Trade: Does DraftKings Rally Into the Big Game?
A quantitative deep-dive into one of sports betting's most obvious—but untested—seasonal patterns
"The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions." — Seth Klarman
“The Super Bowl is the single biggest betting event of the year. Surely that shows up in the stock?”
I’ve wondered this for years. DraftKings DKNG 0.00%↑ is essentially a leveraged bet on American sports gambling. The Super Bowl is the industry’s Christmas. So after watching the Panther’s loss on Saturday night, I finally did what any self-respecting trader would do: I built a full event study framework, pulled Google Trends data, backtested multiple strategies, and ran 1,000 placebo simulations to see if the pattern is real or just confirmation bias.
The results? Surprisingly compelling! But with a massive asterisk.
Let’s dig in.
