‘This is a money-losing proposition for most of these individuals’: Americans are draining stock portfolios to shovel more money into sports betting

Rob Minnick fell into debt for the first time at age 19. Sitting in the back of his classroom during a freshman year math class, the now-27-year-old placed a wager on the New York Yankees during an MLB spring training game that sent him into the red. He assured his parents it wouldn’t happen again.

“Then it would happen five more times over the next five years,” he told Fortune.

Minnick gambled away the unemployment checks he received from his college campus job as he waited out the COVID lockdown from his parents’ house. When the stock market tumbled at the beginning of the pandemic, he yanked money from his stock portfolio and sold his Bitcoin and Ethereum, using the money to stoke the flames of a growing gambling addiction.

“My thought was, I need to get this money out and make it back right now, and then I’ll buy double what I just had, and then I’ll hold it,” he said.

Minnick will admit his myopia now, but his financial habits surrounding his gambling disorder are far from singular. A new wave of studies has found an increasing number of Americans are dumping stocks and draining savings in order to fuel sports betting habits—and finding themselves in financial turmoil as a result.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018—effectively legalizing sports betting—U.S. sports betting revenue has exploded from $441 million in revenue in 2018 to more than $16.6 billion in 2025, according to Sportsbook Review. 

The industry has minted billion-dollar deals between leagues and online platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel. And Americans placed about $30 billion in legal bets during the 2025 NFL season. That’s a big payday for the sports book and sports industry, yet it’s a hole burned in the pocket of many gamblers.

“This is a money-losing proposition for most of these individuals,” Scott Baker, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Fortune. “On average, this is representing a drain to people’s finances.”

Baker authored a study, set to be published next month in the Journal of Financial Economics, that found that household bets increased $1,100 per year in states that legalized online sports betting. Meanwhile, the study also found a nearly 14% decrease in net investments in households after the introduction of legal online sports betting. 

These gamblers are not just funneling money from other parts of an entertainment budget to sustain their betting habits, Baker said. Instead, they’re also using funds to attend sports games or watching sports in restaurants or bars, creating a snowball effect of money spent on sports betting and its accompanying entertainment activities.

“We’re seeing that this gambling plus increases in consumption are both detracting from some of the longer run equity investments—or positive, easy, risky investments that people have been making—and tend to put more pressure and strain on their budgets in general,” Baker said.

A colleague in the field, Brett Hollenbeck, a........

© Fortune