Rating
The Pequod Review:
While Joe Peta was laid up after the dual tragedies of an automobile accident and a layoff (he worked for Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis), he used his spare time to develop a proprietary model to successfully bet on baseball games. His resulting book, Trading Bases, is an intelligent layman’s summary of not just how he created his model but also a broader review of related topics, including:
-- Which sports are the most predictable, and therefore bettable (baseball is at the top of the list)
-- The efficiency of various betting markets (the casino “vig” is much smaller for baseball bets than other sports)
-- Money management (to ensure that a run of bad luck didn’t wipe out his bankroll, Peta capped his maximum bet at 2% of his total principal)
-- How to separate luck from skill in performance evaluations (which has wider applicability to finance and business)
Peta's narrative tends to jump around a lot, and it is not quite as deep or detailed as I would have liked (most significantly, he doesn’t adequately detail his betting outcomes). But this is nonetheless a highly intelligent book.