The-Odds-Api

This post is a continuation of Stocks vs Sports. Please see the previous post, Inception, for more context. See all the code on Github. When trying to compare bets made on Wall Street against those made in Vegas, I’ll need data. Lots of data. Look at all of this data! Big data, much data. Very actionable. In order to do anything useful, I need to be able to obtain and store both stock and sports gambling data reliably. In the old days, this would be reading through the sports and finance section of the paper. Nowadays, I’m not even 100% sure that there is a “paper” to read through, so I’m going to be relying on different APIs that can feed data in real time. Recall from my previous post, Inception, that I’ll be using the Alpha Vantage API for stocks, and the Odds API for sports gambling. Testing these APIs is trivial as you can demo them directly on their website. Here’s an Alpha Vantage query with a demo API Key. Here’s the demo documentation for the Odds API. From an initial smoke check, it appears that they’ll fulfill all the needs that I have. In this post, I’ll outline the data generation component of the stocks vs sports system. To keep it simple, I’ll narrow the scope of the data generation to just the “stocks” side. I’ll create a follow-up post with the outline of how the sports gambling data is created. ...

I love gambling on sports. I never win money, but adding a bit of risk to an otherwise mundane matchup can make watching games more exciting. I don’t love gambling on the stock market. It just isn’t as much fun. In both cases, I take my money and use it to buy a chance at more money in the future. Where the outcome in sports is influenced by the competing teams ( and in some cases, the referees), the outcome for stocks is controlled by any number of “animal spirits”. The uncertainty of the stock market clearly has many influential factors, from normal market fluctuations to public manipulation. Yet gambling on sports is viewed as a riskier and less lucrative proposition. Does it have to be? A savvy investor will likely outperform a savvy gambler, but what about an idiot like me? Is there actual historical data that would support that if you bet with no strategy and invested with no strategy, Wall Street would win out over Vegas? Is there a way to beat the odds by using my rudimentary data analysis skills? Of course not! But I still want a way to answer these questions with a silly and over-engineered solution. ...