Portnoy is right and wrong, that gambling on stocks is not the same as wagering on sports, and that the act is somehow sporting. On-line wagering on stocks is not sport. It is computer gaming.
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Dave Portnoy Says He’s the Most Talked About Name on Wall Street
Luke McGrath
Dave Portnoy
Photographer: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy says he’s the most talked about person on Wall Street.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Portnoy pivoted from covering sports as Barstool’s “El Presidente” to live streaming himself making stock picks as “Davey Day Trader.”
“If you told me that was going to happen six months ago I would’ve looked at you like you had 10 heads,” Portnoy said during an interview on the Masters in Business podcast with Barry Ritholtz.
Click here to listen to the interview with Portnoy
“It’s colorful, it’s different, I don’t think anybody on Wall Street had ever seen somebody like myself,” Portnoy said, adding that he was trading “with large amounts of money and being very upfront about it.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Portnoy said he realized investing had the potential to fill the content gap while professional sports was on hiatus.
“Sports was canceled, but it was a sport in a different kind of way really,” he said.
Since he’s become a day trader, Portnoy has made waves by calling out Warren Buffett, exchanging insults with Wolfpack Research and slamming a Deutsche Bank analyst for his cautious view of Penn National Gaming Inc., which has a 36% equity-stake in Barstool.
“I think a lot of people on Wall Street actually love it,” Portnoy said, noting he gets comments that his content is refreshing and a breath of fresh air.
Portnoy, who has 1.8 million Twitter followers, said his investment strategy is to focus mostly on brand names rather than “panic stocks.”
His foray into day trading hasn’t been easy. Portnoy said he lost about $3 million early on in part due to failed attempts to short stocks, a practice he has since given up. Since then, he said his portfolio gained as much as $4 million on paper and that he’s currently up about $1 million after the market’s recent pullback.
“That doesn’t bother me at all because I’m up. When you’re down it’s a lot harder to go further down. But, I do overall believe if you just hold, and you have the time to hold, stocks will always go up,” Portnoy said. “Unlike sports gambling where the clock strikes zero and the game’s over and you owe, the stock market really doesn’t do that, it keeps going.”
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