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If you can gamble on your phone — do you need to go to Las Vegas?

“Sin City” is having one of its worst summers in years — but America hasn’t lost its lust for gambling. Quite the opposite, in fact, as sports betting, event contracts, and high-risk trading explode.

Claire Yubin Oh, David Crowther

8/14/25 8:48AM

The click-clacking of the roulette tables, the dings, chimes, beeps, and whistles of the slot machines, and the general hum of America’s gambling capital should be reaching fever pitch about now.

But this year, Sin City is a little quieter than usual.

According to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the number of visitors to the City of Lights has dropped every single month in 2025, relative to 2024, with June seeing 11% fewer tourists compared to the same time a year before. Hotel occupancy rates are down, and passenger numbers through the city’s Harry Reid International Airport have also fallen 4% so far this year.

Tourism in las vegas is slowing down — Sherwood News

Deserted

Historically a barometer worth watching to get a sense of how frivolous Middle America is feeling, Las Vegas’ woes are out of step with many of the other signals from the economy. Tariff-induced recession fears have abated, and though the city’s scorching heat is intimidating, it’s always like this in Nevada in summer.

Even during some of the worst financial conditions, like the global financial crisis, the yearly drop in visitors was not as affected as this year (down 6%). Put simply: in modern times, Vegas has never seen this level of slowdown with the exception of the pandemic.

So, what explains Sin City’s slowdown?

Some people think it’s simply become too expensive, with exorbitant fees for everything from parking to food. Just yesterday, Time magazine wrote about Las Vegas’ slump, saying:

“Some blame rising prices, others have attributed Vegas’s fall to the rise of other vacation destinations like Nashville, while the Las Vegas Convention Center Authority attributed the downturn to ‘economic uncertainty and weaker consumer confidence.’”

Those, maybe, are all relevant to varying degrees, but there’s one major factor not mentioned: Americans’ growing ability to take wild bets while sitting on their couch.

It’s in the game

Vegas’ slowdown comes as an online sports betting craze sweeps over the nation. Since the Supreme Court overturned a federal law banning sports betting in 2018, the market has now grown to 38 states, with the vast majority of them also permitting mobile and online gambling. Last year, Legal Sports Report estimated that Americans wagered some $150 billion on sports, 24% more than the year before — thanks to the mobile-friendly betting experience that allows millions of users to take a punt anytime, anywhere.

Sports betting is booming in the US — Sherwood News

That doesn’t look like a nation that’s done gambling.

The sports betting boom is especially pronounced among younger men, with 48% of American men under 50 having an account on a digital sportsbook, per the Siena Research Institute. Nor are they disproportionally played by poorer folks like traditional state lotteries — a decent chunk of sports gamblers are well-off, with 44% of them reportedly earning more than $100,000 a year. That’s a Las Vegas crowd.

And from prime-time Super Bowl commercials to big celebrity endorsements, online sportsbooks like FanDuel owner Flutter Entertainment have been playing their cards right to tailor to that audience, spending billions on sales and marketing last year.

DraftKings billboard in Kansas — An advertisement for DraftKings Sportsbook, the official sports betting partner of the NFL Playoffs, on a billboard in Kansas City, Kansas (Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)

Those ad dollars are paying off, with FanDuel and rival DraftKings currently commanding a whopping 67% of the American online sports betting scene combined, with the FanDuel owner now boasting a market cap of $52 billion — way ahead of the $37 billion market value of the iconic physical resort and casino giant Las Vegas Sands.

Modern-day prophets

Just as the sports betting wave rolls across the country, another way to express a view, take a punt, and add risk to a gambler’s portfolio has also taken flight: prediction markets.

Breaking into the mainstream in the run-up to last year’s presidential elections, prediction sites like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to stake money on the results of real-world events — the odds of a recession, who is going to win Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, or even the chances of a potential Swift-Kelce engagement. Kalshi and Polymarket were recently valued at $2 billion and over $1 billion, respectively.

Bets on prediction markets are increasing — Sherwood News

Bets on prediction platforms are structured as short-term derivatives contracts on a yes-or-no outcome, in which prices for opposing sides add up to $1 at the time of betting and then pay out the full dollar (minus fees) if the choice turns out to be correct. In the US, this unique process means prediction market providers are regulated as derivatives platforms, allowing these newcomers to bypass sports gambling bans in certain states.

That’s how you get a market hooked on who is going to be the next pope, what inflation will be, or who President Trump might tap to run the Fed. But that’s not the only derivatives market that’s booming.

I need this by EOD

While sports betting has been taking off, another retail revolution has been in the making in the world of investing, as platforms like Robinhood Markets have given armies of retail traders the tools to trade financial derivatives.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. Authors of this article own Robinhood stock as part of their compensation.)

Indeed, the number of retail investors trading derivatives has exploded in the last decade — with some estimates suggesting that retail traders were behind nearly one in two options trades in the US in mid-2023.

One type of contract in particular has soared in volumes: zero day to expiry options (0DTE). In the span of five years up to Q1 2025, 0DTE options, which investors use to make same-day bets on market movements, have grown nearly fivefold for the S&P 500.

Zero days to expiry options trading is popular — Sherwood News

Though historically used by institutional investors to hedge against large price changes, 0DTE options are now drawing retail speculators, lured in by the chance to make large gains if prices swing wildly in their favor in a short amount of time — a behavior that’s been compared to gambling by many.

House money

Of course, whether it’s a bet on your phone or a crisp stack of chips pushed across the felt of a table under the clockless, windowless walls of a Las Vegas casino floor, the old adage remains for players: in the long run, the house always wins.

However, another adage also applies to the struggling giants of the Las Vegas Strip — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And that’s exactly what the Sin City casinos are trying to do, in an attempt to become omnichannel players. Wynn Las Vegas, the biggest casino on the Strip, ventured into the online world with “WynnBET,” while the world-famous MGM brand has its own sportsbook for mobile and retail sports betting called “BetMGM.”

But real-world expertise doesn’t guarantee success. In August 2023, Wynn shuttered its efforts in eight states, with its CFO saying, “In light of the continued requirement for outsized marketing spend through user acquisition and promotions in online sports betting, we believe there are higher and better uses of capital deployment for Wynn Resorts shareholders.”

Matt Phillips

Palantir slips under 50-day moving average, amid momo reversal

What goes up, doesn’t always keep going up.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp PLTR insane valuation

Matt Phillips

Momentum stocks reverse, weighing on US markets

Momentum stocks dragged the market lower Friday, with stocks like Palantir Technologies, SoundHound AI, Rocket Lab, Robinhood Markets, and GE Vernova continuing a recent slide.

(Robinhood Markets, Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)

The iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF opened 1% higher and built on those gains before reversing hard early in the session to trade 1% lower as of 11 a.m. ET.

If it closes at these levels, this fund that holds US stocks with the best risk-adjusted trailing returns will have completed a so-called “bearish engulfing candle pattern.” As the name suggests is, this is considered to be a negative technical signal that occurs when, the day after a security rises, it ends up opening above the previous day’s closing price and closes below the previous day’s opening price.

Luke Kawa

US stocks rise as soft job growth fortifies bets on a Federal Reserve rate cut this month

ETFs that track major US stock indexes are higher and short-term yields are falling after the August jobs report continued to confirm the trend of labor market cooling, calcifying bets on a Federal Reserve rate cut this month.

Non-farm payrolls rose by just 22,000 in August, while economists had expected an addition of 75,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, in line with estimates. Revisions to the past two months were also negative, but not as severe as in the July report.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF was up 0.3% to session highs in the minutes following the release, while two-year US Treasury yields fell below 3.5%.

A report and market reaction like this suggests traders are embracing the idea that the softening in the US labor market is primarily driven by supply-side factors in light of major changes to net immigration, as recently argued by economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, and isn’t a worrying sign that the US economy is on the verge of a recession.

With revisions, June’s non-farm payroll growth is now -13,000. That’s the first month of net job losses since December 2020. And the underemployment rate (or U6, which includes the unemployed, those employed part time who want a full-time job, and those who want a job but aren’t looking for one currently) rose to 8.1%, its highest level since October 2021.

Some see this data as much more concerning than the market reaction implies.

“Since a month or two ago, policy hawks, growth bulls (I call them wrong), have been arguing two things. First, sequential growth should perk up because the weakness in the summer was all a function of uncertainty around Liberation Day. Second, focus on the ratios because the unemployment rate is still low,” Neil Dutta, head of US economics at Renaissance Macro Research, wrote. “Both of these views were wrong as we now know. Employment growth is still cooling (there is no uptick in hours either) and the unemployment rate is rising. Bye Felicia!”

Luke Kawa & Rani Molla

Nvidia, AMD tumble as Broadcom reportedly secures OpenAI as a major new customer

For the stock market, AI has been the rising tide that lifts any boat that can loosely be seen as flying its colors.

But in the genesis of the AI trade this morning — the powerful chip designers of the picks and shovels for this gold rush — there’s a little bit of a zero-sum element at play:

Broadcom is flying up double digits on the reported addition of OpenAI as the major customer that’s ordered $10 billion in custom chips, significantly improving its 2026 revenue outlook in the process.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is down 3% and No. 3 US chip player Advanced Micro Devices is faring even worse, as this news comes one day after analysts at Seaport cut that stock to neutral, saying that its AI accelerator business hasn’t gained much traction yet. The Street had been very optimistic about the prospects for its new line of chips.

AMD and Nvidia both reported quarterly sales that exceeded expectations, with guidance for revenues in the current quarter that were also ahead of estimates. Nevertheless, both stocks fell after reporting results. To get a positive reaction as a major AI chip designer this earnings season, it seems you need to have done something so good for your company that it actually hurts your competitors’ outlooks.

As we’ve noted, Nvidia’s data center revenues are extremely concentrated, with just three customers (one of which is suspected to be OpenAI) making up over half of direct hardware sales. And despite the chip designer’s protestations to the contrary, the AI boom is more supply-constrained than demand-constrained. So it makes sense that hyperscalers aiming to equip themselves with state-of-the-art technology are looking to do so from a variety of major suppliers.

In its latest conference call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed the threat of custom chips (or ASICs) muscling in on his turf, and highlighted several of the perceived advantages of choosing his company’s products:

“One of the advantages that we have is that NVIDIA is available in every cloud. We're available from every computer company. We're available from the cloud to on-prem to edge to robotics on the same programming model. And so it's sensible that every framework in the world supports NVIDIA. When you're building a new model architecture, releasing it on NVIDIA is most sensible.
And so the diversity of our platform, both in the ability to evolve into any architecture, the fact that we're everywhere, and also we accelerate the entire pipeline. Everything from data processing, to pre-training, to post-training with reinforcement learning, all the way out to inference. And so, when you build a data center with NVIDIA platform in it, the utility of it is best. The lifetime usefulness is much, much longer.”

“Because our performance per dollar is so incredible, you also have extremely great margins. So, the growth opportunity with NVIDIA's architecture and the gross margins opportunity with NVIDIA's architecture is absolutely the best. And so there's a lot of reasons why NVIDIA is chosen by every cloud and every startup and every computer company. We're really a holistic, full-stack solution for AI factories.”