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How to play Ox Riches
For Birkin, the share-price decline has gone well beyond the deterioration in earnings expectations. Fantini sees the industry’s great growth phase as largely behind it. Beynon’s focus is on what the market can see today: earnings and cash flow, rather than promises of future sportsbook growth. And for Robinson, the weakness is no longer simply a matter of valuation. It is increasingly showing up in the fundamentals themselves.
Nobody is predicting the end of gambling. The market is still growing. Good operators are still making money. New products are emerging.
But what has changed is what shareholders want those companies to prove – and the price they are willing to pay for that proof.
How to play Ox Riches
“People will lose money faster on exchanges for lots of reasons,” Marantelli says. “It inherently increases spend, volatility, lots of things. And you’re playing against a sharper audience than you’re playing against at the DraftKings sportsbook.”
He compares the effect with sportsbook cash-out features, which gave customers more apparent control over their bets but may also have encouraged greater spending. The crucial difference is that an exchange customer can be facing a specialist whose entire business is identifying inaccurately priced contracts.
Kendrick sees a warning in the history of betting exchanges. In their early growth phase, there was sufficient retail liquidity for numerous market makers to profit. As that retail pool weakened, the sharper firms increasingly found themselves trading against one another.
How to play Ox Riches
Based on its projections, EKG sees the overall sports wagering industry growing 8% year-over-year, outpacing the current baseline growth rate of 5% (a figure that strips out temporary boosts from the 2026 World Cup).
Assuming that 8% spurt is realized, it’d be impressive because since the end of the 2025 football season, only Missouri and Alberta, Canada joined the live and legal sports betting party with Arkansas opening to DraftKings and FanDuel earlier this year.
Prediction markets have proven effective at attracting sharp bettors and high-rollers who are often limited or banned by traditional sportsbooks. However, consumer surveys indicate that when given the choice between a sportsbook and a yes/no exchange, most recreational bettors still prefer the traditional sportsbook interface. That dynamic helps explain why prediction markets remain in second place.
