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The PGA Tour’s west coast swing to start the new year concludes this weekend with the Genesis Invitational at historic Riviera Country Club outside Los Angeles. Just about any movie star who likes to golf has played Riviera – also known as “Hogan’s Alley” as the legendary Ben Hogan won the Los Angeles Open at the track three times as well as the 1948 U.S. Open there.

The Genesis Invitational is hosted by and benefits the Tiger Woods Foundation, and while Woods will be on the grounds some this weekend, he’s still not healthy enough to play off another back surgery. We might not see Tiger compete until the Masters. This is a very rare event he has yet to win; Jack Nicklaus never won it, either. The tournament was renamed the Genesis Invitational last year, and an invitational means the fields are a bit smaller (120 players) and the purses a bit bigger. It’s still 72-hole stroke play with a 36-hole cut.

While the field at last week’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am left much to be desired, especially after world No. 1 Dustin Johnson withdrew, it’s a very strong field at Riviera that includes Johnson. He played over in Saudi Arabia on the European Tour two weeks ago and won. Technically, that was a second straight win on that Tour when including last November’s rescheduled Masters.

New Hampshire gamblers may hold the key to making smarter sports wagers. Either that, or they just got really lucky. A recent press release by the New Hampshire Lottery shows that sports gamblers won more than they lost on Super Bowl LV bets, which could only mean that they wagered mostly on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to beat the Kansas City Chiefs. Given the fact that the Chiefs were 3-point favorites going into the game, New Hampshire gamblers must really like the underdog. 

The Lottery indicates that gamblers in the state put up around $7.1 million on the Super Bowl, but they collected over $8.8 million. It adds that 81% of the wagers were on the Bucs, with a lot more attention being given on this Super Bowl than on last year’s. In 2020, when the Chiefs collected their first Super Bowl win in 50 years, New Hampshire gamblers wagered about $2.31 million, $5 million less than they did this year. Given that DraftKings holds a monopoly on sports gambling in the state, the book didn’t come out as well as it had hoped from the Super Bowl.

Charlie McIntyre, the executive director of the Lottery, adds, “Sports fans across New England know you cannot bet against Tom Brady, even if it is a little bittersweet watching him lead a different team to a Super Bowl championship. We want to congratulate our players for remaining loyal to the GOAT and for winning big in this year’s Super Bowl. With players betting more than $7.1 million, the volume of wagering on the Super Bowl speaks for itself. We are pleased to see the continued enthusiastic response to sports betting here in New Hampshire and we are excited to continue building momentum with this still relatively new product.”

Prop bets proved very enticing this year, as well. In New Hampshire, a lot of wagers were placed on props like whether Tom Brady would win the Super Bowl MVP title or if tight end Rob Gronkowski would score a touchdown, and both paid off for gamblers. Brady took the title, the fifth of his career, and Gronkowski not only scored a TD, but he scored the first in the game as the Bucs pummeled the Chiefs 31-9. 

Kangwon Land is making another run at a post-COVID-19 recovery. The only casino in South Korea that can allow locals to gamble was repeatedly forced to shut down last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest occurring at the beginning of December. As it appears that COVID-19 is waning, or at least ebbing once again, South Korea is hoping it can try to put some type of normalcy back in place and Kangwon Land is going to see what happens, as well. The casino reopened yesterday, but not without serious precautions meant to avoid yet another shutdown.

Kangwon Land began operating yesterday at 10 AM. For now, only as many as 1,200 locals will be able to hit the gambling floor, but the property will remain-ultra vigilant to avoid any recurrences of the coronavirus. The casino shares ground with a ski and golf resort in the Gangwon Province and, as South Korea relaxes its COVID-19 restrictions, greater amounts of local foot traffic could bring greater risks of another outbreak.

According to South Korean health officials, the number of daily coronavirus infections has dropped substantially over the past five days. Where there were, on average, 1,000 new daily infections, there are now just 375, a sign that, perhaps, the country is winning the war against the seemingly indomitable virus. As a result, the South Korean national health alert level has been dropped to 1.5 to 2 around the country, except for the Seoul metropolitan area. It has seen more coronavirus cases and was operating under level 2.5, which has now been dropped to 2.

Kangwon Land took a major hit last year because of the pandemic and is anxious to get things running again. It was shut down three times before 2020 closed out and reported consistent losses throughout the year. In November, when it released its third-quarter performance, it reported a loss of $36.6 million that followed a loss of about $38.4 million in the previous quarter. In its latest update, Kangwon Land acknowledged that it took it on the chin last year, suffering a 2020 loss of about $250.2 million. The hit came as the casino saw its annual revenue fall 68.5% from what it recorded a year earlier.

No one in the industry can underestimate the old fashioned values of building trust amongst customers. Richard Downey, Senior VP for Connections by the Specialist Works, understands that more than most. He sat down with Calvinayre.com’s Becky Liggero Fontana to share his insights on the U.S. sports betting market.

Downey emphasized leveraging relationships from prior careers. “I was publisher of a magazine called Poker Player and I moved from there into the agency. I’ve been able to maintain an involvement in the gaming industry by having clients in the space,” Downey said.

Downey is a firm believer that operators still require a that branding plays an integral part in building trust with customers in the highly competitive U.S. sports betting market. 

“In the gaming sector there is an element of credibility and trustworthiness that exists everywhere, but especially in the U.S. market. Getting access to online gaming in the U.S. market for the past period of time has not been completely legitimated. Gaming is being rebranded as mainstream entertainment and it’s really important that the brands that come through with it do a good job for the customers.”

With millions of Americans out of work, the first sign of a recovery has to be in new jobs coming on the market. The tribal gaming industry is doing its part, with several operators posting new jobs in the past few weeks.

Seneca Gaming Corporation has lots of jobs available at the Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino in Niagara Falls and Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino in downtown Buffalo. The operator will be hosting a job fair for open positions on February 25 between 10:00am and 6:00pm.

“Even with the changes and challenges everyone has gone through over the past year, Seneca Gaming Corporation has remained one of the largest employers in Western New York, and we are excited to be growing our team across a variety of departments,” said Meghan Smith, Seneca Gaming Corporation’s vice president of human resources. “We truly believe that the time we spend at work should be rewarding, fulfilling and fun. That’s how we approach our jobs every day. If people are looking an opportunity in that type of environment, we are ready to talk to them.”

Attendees can check out what’s on offer in person or virtually, but should be ready for an interview at a moment’s notice.

The entire concept of a “bull market in stocks” makes little sense. Sound crazy? These days, certainly, because we’re always hearing about a perpetual bull market in stocks. Valuations increasingly disconnected from economic reality, asset bubbles in one class or another, armies of speculators moving like zombie hoards descending on the next fad and blowing it up to infinity and beyond, Buzz Lightyear-like.

Why is the whole concept of a bull market generally, nonsense? Because if the value of everything is going up simultaneously, then nothing is going up. If everyone is a superhero, nobody is. If, in an imaginary economy, absolutely everything costs, say, $5, (labor, land, capital whatever) and then the next day everything costs $10, then what’s changed? The answer is absolutely nothing.

The only thing that matters is relative valuations between asset classes. Let’s divide them into three of the most basic ones. Equities (stocks), bonds (debt), and commodities (consumer goods). If all three are going up in tandem, then there is no “bull market” in anything. If commodities are going up faster than stocks and bonds, you have inflation, or even hyperinflation. Ask anyone in Venezuela whether they care that their stock market is doing great, nominally. They don’t. They’re looking for their next glop of gruel or morsel of moldy bread to survive the day.

But if stocks and bonds are rising and consumer goods are static to falling, you have a bull market in financial assets. This is where we are now. And boy are we really hard and deep into it now. Below is the ratio of the S&P 500 to the CRB Commodities Index.