The Jock Exchange: Wall Street is about to launch a new way to trade professional athletes the way you trade stocks.

This Portfolio magazine piece has been linked to by Marginal Revolution, Freakonomics, and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic… on top of being brought to the public by the print edition of this new business magazine…

… and there’s only 2 comments posted on their site. Bizarre.

The Jock Exchange: Wall Street is about to launch a new way to trade professional athletes the way you trade stocks.

[...] With that in mind—and taking the Oakland A’s as his inspiration—in 2004, Mike Kerns left his job working for sports agent Jeff Moorad, now general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, to accept millions of dollars in Silicon Valley venture capital and open a jock exchange called Protrade. (His co-founder was Jeff Ma, the ringleader of a group of M.I.T. students, made famous by the book Bringing Down the House, who won more than $3 million from Las Vegas casinos.) On the surface, Protrade, which has its headquarters in San Mateo, California, looks like another fantasy-sports website, but just below the surface lies the model for the jock exchange. Like a market in corporate shares, Protrade trades year-round and in real time, and a lot of different people can buy the stock and own, in effect, little pieces of an athlete. They can watch their Peyton Manning stock rise and fall from play to play during the season and see what happens if he’s traded to another team in the off-season. The exchange also allows them to short the jock’s stock—to profit from his poor performance. Each stock pays dividends, which gain in value based on the athlete’s on-field performance.

Protrade’s goal is to model the underlying reality of a sport. It’s the reason the company employs researchers [*], and it’s what got Protrade hired to consult for the Portland Trail Blazers and San Francisco 49ers. In the beginning, this market will probably be based on cruder and more widely understood performance stats. “But,” says Kerns, “as the market grows and the liquidity and sophistication of institutional investors increase, there will be trading products that require more-sophisticated analysis, and we’ll need to truly quantify the value of an assist that leads to a dunk versus an assist that leads to a 5-foot jumper, or the value a running back should receive for a 3-yard run versus an 8-yard run, compared with the value received by the offensive line.” [...]

Previous: ProTrade co-founder Jeff Ma gives inklings. + ProTrade = The Jock Exchange, the first public stock market that trades in professional athletes??

[*] I can’t locate the list on the ProTrade website.