About this item
An ex-Wall Street trader improved on Moneyball's famed sabermetrics and beat the Vegas odds with his own betting methods. Here is the story of how Joe Peta turned fantasy baseball into a dream come true. Joe Peta turned his back on his Wall Street trading career to pursue an ingenious - and incredibly risky - dream. He would apply his risk-analysis skills to Major League Baseball, and treat the sport like the S&P 500. In Trading Bases, Peta takes us on his journey from the ballpark in San Francisco to the trading floors and baseball bars of New York and the sportsbooks of Las Vegas, telling the story of how he created a baseball "hedge fund" with an astounding 41 percent return in his first year. And he explains the unique methods he developed.
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 to fruitlessly pursue an interview with Olympic Gold Medal winning swimmer Summer Sanders.
In 2011, while recovering from a massive leg injury which curtailed his trading career on Wall Street, Joe began writing Trading Bases, A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball. The book will be published on March 7, 2013 by Dutton Books, a division of the Penguin Group (USA) .
Joe lives in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters, and while none of them really like baseball, the youngest one does enjoy saying "Marco Scutaro."
