Las Vegas, Dec. 27: Miles away from the glamour of the Las Vegas Strip, past foreclosed homes and dusty tracts of desert, Wall Street bond powerhouse, Mr Cantor Fitzgerald, has placed millions of dollars of its own money on the table.
At the M Resort Spa Casino, Mr Lee Amaitis, a former bond trader who now runs Mr Fitzgerald’s operations here, held court in a dimly lighted plush orange V.I.P. booth lined with large Champagne bottles. Leaning forward, he talked excitedly about the ambitious plans for the Cantor Gaming subsidiary.
“There’s big money, especially now that we are moving onto the Strip,” he said.
Mr Fitzgerald is one of the biggest brokers of United States government securities, considered among the safest places to invest. Cantor Gaming handles some of the riskiest. It runs the sports book at the M Resort, a relatively new casino popular among Las Vegas locals. It has or will soon start handling the sports betting operations at the Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and at the recently opened Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and the Tropicana Las Vegas, all on or near the Strip.
And the tycoon is banking on the next frontier in gambling: a licence that would allow sports betting on mobile devices anywhere in Nevada, as long as the bettor had an account at a casino.
Wall Street executives usually protest when their business is compared to a casino. But there is a logic to privately held Cantor’s Vegas subsidiary, casino industry experts say.
“Guys who trade Treasuries are doing it for basis points, and sports betting is not much different,” said Mr Jeffrey B. Logsdon, an entertainment and gaming analyst for BMO Capital Markets.
“Trading a million dollars in Treasuries is different than trading a billion. Sports betting is the same. You want the spread, volume and you see yourself as a match maker.”
Still, for him it is potentially a risky bet. Unlike most sports books, which typically cap wagers at $1,000 to $10,000, Cantor Gaming’s book has a take-all-comers policy, exposing it to losses if it cannot hedge its bigger bets.
During Super Bowl XLIV this year, it handled a few bets in excess of $500,000.
His push into Vegas is being led by the 61-year-old Mr Lee Amaitis, whose past includes a conviction in his 20s for dealing cocaine. Cantor Gaming, Mr Amaitis says, mitigates its risk through volume.
In 2008, Cantor Gaming bought Las Vegas Sports Consultants, the world’s largest odds maker. It sets the odds for more than 40 per cent of the casinos in Las Vegas, and Cantor used that data to expand into what is known as in-running betting, which lets people wager on portable devices on sporting events in progress.
Sports betting — wagering on the outcome of events such as football games and horse races — is still a small part of Las Vegas gambling. It accounts for just 1.7 per cent of all gambling wins in Nevada, according to the state’s Gaming Control Board.
Most large casino operators, including Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts, run their own sports book, taking on limited risk but keeping all the profit.