Moneyball for the Money Set: Using Sports Analytics to Predict the Returns of Portfolio Managers with Startling Accuracy

by Joe Peta

In 2003, Michael Lewis' Moneyball introduced readers to the data-driven process employed by the Oakland A's for the purpose of acquiring wins on the cheap. The A's philosophy -- use a player's skills to determine his value and compare it to his cost in the marketplace -- led to a revolution in strategic thinking across every other team sport, in front offices and on the field. Because the logic mirrored that of investors, it led to a bevy of bold-faced names in the financial industry owning franchises across every major U.S. sports league.

Joe Peta examined this critical reasoning overlap in his best-selling memoir, Trading Bases , and wondered, "Why doesn't the financial industry adopt some of the best practices of the sports analytics community as well?" He spent the last ten years doing exactly that at a fintech start-up and hedge funds, often on behalf of some of the country's biggest endowments and pension funds. In fact, at the same time Steve Cohen was buying the Mets and migrating hedge fund talent to the team's front office, Joe was working at Cohen's hedge fund applying the tenets of sports analytics to the firm's roster of portfolio managers.

In Moneyball for the Money Set , Joe pulls back the curtain on his decades of work in the financial industry giving any individual or organization who invests in publicly traded equities the ability to asses the skills of their portfolio managers. For decades, starting with the research of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, investors have had a roadmap to assess and value securities under consideration for investment. Joe's ground-breaking research aims to give allocators and CIO's the same tool, only in this case, it's PM instead of security analysis.

Unlike the application of analytics at professional sports franchises, the framework in Moneyball for the Money Set is worth a lot more to the user than a shiny trophy. In the hands of many endowments, pensions, multi-manager hedge funds and other institutional investors, it can improve returns by tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars, annually.

212 pages, Hardcover

Published August 24, 2023

About the author

Raised in West Chester, PA by a first generation Italian-American father who adopted baseball as a symbol of his love of America, Joe Peta quickly learned the joy of following the sport --- and the pain of being a 1970s-era Phillies fan. Undaunted, by the time he was a teenager, Joe felt certain that his heroes Mike Schmidt, Larry Bowa, Steve Carlton, et al would one day be his co-workers.

While his father instilled a love of baseball in him, sadly, Joe inherited his mother's throwing arm, so by the time he was in college at Virginia Tech he turned his career ambitions toward the glamorous and fast-paced life of a Certified Public Accountant. His new heroes were men like Bill James and Warren Buffett and Joe parlayed his love of numbers into an MBA from Stanford University. Even in business school, sports were never far from his mind. At Stanford, Joe penned columns in The Stanford Daily and The Reporter that earned him a following in spite of constant references to Melrose Place, and his turning down the opportunity to interview campus golfer Tiger Woods.

His debut effort, Trading Bases, A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball (Penguin Group) dropped in 2013 and topped best seller lists in both Baseball and Business categories. A Preview of the 2019 Masters published in 2019, contained a shockingly accurate preview of the event and was the #2 selling golf book of the year. Joe's latest effort, Moneyball for the Money Set was released in August, 2023.

Joe lives in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters, who would very much like his next book to either be about ballet or Taylor Swift.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Joe Peta writes it, I’ll read it. Simple as that

[David Ball · Rating 2 out of 5]

Over promises, under delivers.