"Going Long" on Shares of UCB

The expectations for the Cal football team are sky high. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a series of articles in today's special Pac-10 preview including the lead article (link here). Not surprisingly, the Cal-USC matchup is getting quite a bit of national attention including from ESPN and ABC. Not so much because Cal and USC are expected to be the top two teams in the conference, but rather, because of the backstory involving last season's BCS debacle. USC's only loss was to Cal in triple overtime, ultimately costing them the outright national championship and tossing the entire BCS computerized scoring system into chaos. USC, the consensus number one in the country, will be out for revenge. But this year's Cal team is strong enough to make the matchup very interesting. This year's football viewing season will be a busy one with the program in Berkeley getting so much attention (and televised coverage); not to mention my participation in a friend's fantasy football league. The live draft for the league is in a couple of days and the trash talk amongst the ten participants has already begun. Fantasy football should be interesting this year especially with the involvement of two long-time veterans in our league. During football season, much of Wall Street spends as much time glued to the fantasy football ticker as it does to the exchange ticker. Scary. In fact, our Bloomberg terminals on the floor provide real-time football scores, news, and player updates. Trading stocks or trading players. Same approach, same skills involved. Buy low, sell high. Shares in IBM undervalued? How about Pittsburgh wide receiver Plaxico Burress? Shares in UT Starcom a growth opportunity? How about San Francisco quarterback Tim Rattay? Now if the Cal football program were a stock, it's beta would be off the charts. On a related note, the University of Iowa operates a simulated "market" in which participants can buy or sell futures based on their expectations of who will win the Presidential Election (link here). It's considered to be fairly accurate. Bush was last trading at 0.525 while Kerry was at 0.476 (latest quotes here). Not a good sign for the Democrats.