Trading Bases book cover

Trading Bases by Joe Peta Summary

Trading Bases
Joe Peta
Finance
Business
Entrepreneurship
Overview
Key Takeaways
Author
FAQs

Overview of Trading Bases

When a wheelchair-bound Wall Street trader beats Vegas with baseball analytics, you get "Trading Bases." After being hit by an ambulance, Joe Peta developed a system that yielded 41% returns in 2011. Wall Street meets Moneyball in this quantitative betting phenomenon.

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Key takeaways

1

From Wall Street to Vegas: A Trader's Unexpected Journey

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Imagine waking up one day to find yourself unemployed, immobilized, and separated from your family. That's exactly where Joe Peta found himself in early 2011 after being struck by an FDNY ambulance while crossing West Broadway in New York. The accident shattered his right leg, requiring surgery and a dozen screws. Six weeks after returning to his Wall Street trading job in a wheelchair, Nomura Securities fired him - literally rolling him off the trading floor. In this dark mental space, unable to focus on books or movies and plagued by nightmares, Peta found salvation in an unlikely place: baseball statistics. Drawing on his trading background and love of baseball, he created a betting model that would eventually deliver a remarkable 41% return in its first year. This wasn't just a hobby - it became a full-fledged trading system that caught Warren Buffett's attention and became required reading at several business schools. What makes this story so compelling isn't just the financial success, but how Peta transformed personal tragedy into triumph. By applying Wall Street trading principles to America's pastime, he discovered what one venture capitalist called "the holy grail of uncorrelated returns" - a baseball betting system that worked consistently and independently from traditional financial markets. His journey represents the ultimate pivot: from analyzing stock market inefficiencies to exploiting statistical anomalies in baseball betting lines.

2

Cluster Luck: The Statistical Anomaly That Changed Everything

3

Quantifying Value: The Mathematics of Winning

4

Why Baseball Offers the Perfect Betting Laboratory

5

The Lehman Brothers Lesson: Never Risk Everything

6

The Poetry Behind the Numbers

7

From Model to Reality: Creating a Baseball Hedge Fund

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"Crazy how much I learned while walking the dog. BeFreed = small habits → big gains."

@Matt, YC alum
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"Reading used to feel like a chore. Now it’s just part of my lifestyle."

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"Feels effortless compared to reading. I’ve finished 6 books this month already."

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"Crazy how much I learned while walking the dog. BeFreed = small habits → big gains."

@Matt, YC alum
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108

"Reading used to feel like a chore. Now it’s just part of my lifestyle."

@Erin, Investment Banking Associate , NYC
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"Feels effortless compared to reading. I’ve finished 6 books this month already."

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"BeFreed turned my guilty doomscrolling into something that feels productive and inspiring."

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