Fantasy football and the stock market have more in common than you might think. Executive editor Joe Ciolli breaks down how familiar fantasy football terms can offer a different way to think about…

Transcript

Who can Akua is Amazon? Let me explain. I cover markets news for Business Insider. I win my fantasy football draft every year by applying lessons that I learned in the stock market. The two have a lot more in common than you might think. I’m here to explain to you what things like touchdown vultures are and how that can be applied to the stock market. So a touchdown vulture is basically someone that comes in and runs the ball into the end zone after a long drive. Basically piggybacks off someone else’s hard work. Think of the Bears as Kyle Minang guy going in and poaching his score from DeAndre. Swift after swift ran 60 yards down the field. In the stock market, a good example of a touchdown vulture would be memory stocks. NVIDIA is out here spending billions Wheeling and dealing, really growing this industry, and the memory stocks are out here riding the coattails of companies like NVIDIA and essentially getting a lot of the upside for not a lot of the downside. Something called a handcuff is especially important if you have one of the elite, say, running backs in the NFL. Think Kailyn Black, the backup running back for the San Francisco 49ers. He’s the backup to Christian McCaffrey. Everyone knows Christian McCaffrey is a great back. But guess what the guys made of glass. In the likely chance Christian does not play the whole season, Kaylon Black is gonna be right there to step up and take those touches. The market comparison for this is AMD. AMD is sort of the second in command and the chip making industry behind NVIDIA. If for whatever reason NVIDIA has a company specific problem but chip demand stays high, AMD is the best position to be there as the handcuffed to absorb that demand. There’s also the target hog, which in fantasy football terms is someone that just gets thrown to a lot. We’re talking. 10 * a game. The foremost target hogs in the NFL over the last few years have been the Bengals, Jamar Chase and Putin Nakula of the Los Angeles Rams. These guys are absolute safety blankets for their quarterbacks. The best stock comparison is the hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta. They’re the ones that are at the center of the AI spending ecosystem and they also are the ones that have all the cloud storage. These are companies that are doing very well for themselves and they’re who everyone else wants to work with. So common dilemma for fantasy football managers is whether someone that blows up in the preseason. Is going to continue that? Or rather they were a flash in the pan. The best example of that this season is Dijon Stribbling. He is a second round pick. He’s on the 49ers and apparently he ripped up 49ers camp to the point where he’s the number one receiver on the team now. He absolutely dominated preseason. The stock market comparison for this are these newly IPO companies that make a huge splash initially, but then it’s questionable whether they can sustain it. Think SpaceX or Cerebrus. AI linked companies that did have explosive debuts but have since seen their stocks drop. Really far from record highs. If you want more markets insights from me, follow me on Business Insider or subscribe to my daily newsletter, First Trade.