A decades-old Vegas secret is revealing surprising clues about where capital is flowing right now.
Las Vegas, 1986. The sportsbook at the Stardust Casino is buzzing with activity.
A thin haze of smoke fills the room as it begins to hum with the sound of football fans shouting.
You’ve been chatting with a grizzled regular for the past few minutes. He complains that the line on the day’s biggest game hasn’t moved all morning.
Then, suddenly, he straightens in his chair. His eyes widen as a man enters – quiet, ordinary-looking, except for the thick envelope in his hand.
“That’s one of Billy’s boys,” the regular mutters. “You’re about to see something.”
He crushes his cigarette and heads for the counter. He overhears the man’s wager and then throws down a wad of cash for a bet of his own.
He’s following the money.
Within minutes, the board flashes. Phone calls fly across town. Sportsbooks across Vegas – and around the country – scramble to adjust their odds.
What just happened?
A “whale” just moved the line – and a smart one at that.
As it turns out, the man who placed that bet was a runner for none other than Billy Walters, the most feared sports bettor in Las Vegas history.
He had been placing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bets that morning. He did it quietly, using a sophisticated network to spread wagers at sportsbooks across the city to hide his trail before his money reshaped the market.
For him, it was just another day at the office.
But for folks who took notice early, it was a chance for an incredible payday.
Wall Street works in a similar fashion – except we can track this “smart money” action. In fact, I was one of the first people to do it!
And in today’s Market 360, I’m going to connect the dots between Billy Walters – the man who used analytics to change sports betting forever – my own early work as one of Wall Street’s first quants, and how my colleague Jonathan Rose has taken that same philosophy to a faster, more powerful, real-time level in The Profit Surge Event.
The Original Smart Money
Long before “analytics” became a household word, Billy Walters helped form the Computer Group – a team of statisticians and programmers who built models to find mispriced betting lines.
They tracked player injuries, travel schedules, weather and historical matchups. Then, they used early computer algorithms to calculate probabilities faster than the sportsbooks could adjust.
By the mid-1980s, Walters had turned data into an edge. His reputation for success was so good that casinos across town moved their odds the moment his money hit the counter.
In the world of sports, he was the smart money.
Walters would remain the king of sports gambling in Vegas for 30 years. And today, he has an estimated net worth of $200 million and is a member of the Sports Betting Hall of Fame.
But what made Walters remarkable wasn’t only how much he won, but what his success represented. He proved that the right data could level the playing field – that ordinary observers who understood where informed money was flowing could finally see what the pros saw.
That same lesson shaped my own career on Wall Street.
Leveling the Playing Field
In the 1980s, Wall Street wasn’t all that different. The pros had every advantage.
They had research desks, institutional feeds and the capital to move markets. Most individual investors were left guessing.
I wanted to change that.
So, I built one of the first quantitative systems in finance – a model that measured earnings growth, sales momentum and profit margins.
It also tracked something called institutional buying pressure.
That’s a fancy way of saying it tracks the smart money.
Or, to put it in Vegas terms, the whales.
My goal was simple: follow the same big-money signals that professional investors were using and make them visible to my followers.
That became the foundation for my Stock Grader system (subscription required), and I’ve used it to guide my followers through each major investing cycle – from the rise of semiconductors to the internet to artificial intelligence.
All because we followed a similar principle: data reveals where the smart money is going – and those moves create opportunity for everyone who knows how to see them.
The Next Generation of the Smart Money Strategy
Every discipline evolves, and so does the way we track the market’s biggest players.
My colleague Jonathan Rose represents that next generation.
Jonathan began his career on the trading floors of Chicago. For more than sixteen years, he watched millions of dollars in institutional orders cross the tape each day. He learned to recognize the patterns that signaled when professional traders were moving in or out – and how those moves could spark major price swings.
Over time, he developed a system that detects these shifts in real-time. It identifies what he calls “Big Money tells” – sudden bursts of trading activity that reveal where informed capital is heading.
Now, my followers have a longer-term approach to the market. So, my system tracks institutional buying over months and quarters.
Jonathan’s approach is a little different in that regard. He focuses on the short-term bursts that can drive triple-digit gains in a matter of days or weeks. His approach has already pinpointed extraordinary wins:
- Albemarle Corporation (ALB) – 959%
- MP Materials Corporation (MP) – 1,234%
- C3.ai, Inc. (AI) – 462%
- Criteo S.A. (CRTO) – 245%
- Sibanye Stillwater Limited (SBSW) – 141%.
In many ways, Jonathan’s system today does for traders what mine did for investors forty years ago – it levels the playing field and gives regular people access to the same insight the pros once kept for themselves.
See the Smart Money in Action
Earlier this week, Jonathan, Eric Fry, Luke Lango and I joined forces for The Profit Surge Event. During the broadcast, we each shared one of our top stock ideas for this new rate-cutting cycle.
Jonathan demonstrated how his real-time trading strategy can amplify those same ideas – boosting potential gains by as much as 500% – and revealed three new opportunities he’s tracking right now.
If you missed it, you can still catch the full replay. It’s a rare look at how different disciplines – fundamentals, macro analysis and smart-money tracking – can work together to uncover opportunities in today’s fast-moving market.
You can see exactly how it works – and where the smart money is heading next – by watching The Profit Surge Event replay here.
Sincerely,
Louis Navellier
Editor, Market 360