Spring Break and Vernal Equinox, Blood Moon, and Mercury Retrograde — March is here and it’s giving chaos. And the cherry on top? College basketball. Just in time for this year’s NCAA tournament, FanDuelFLUT

or DraftKingsDKNG

are gaining their biggest new competitor in years — and it might already be on your phone.

You know ball? In the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election, brokerage app RobinhoodHOOD

hosted an election prediction market, allowing investors to augur who would win the White House. Now, they’re offering investors new stakes. In partnership with the CFTC-regulated prediction market Kalshi, Robinhood plans to launch a “prediction markets hub” within its app, allowing people to bet on politics, economics, and sports. It’s the company’s latest push into the emergent space of events contracts.

• Starting later this week, Robinhood will offer markets for March Madness — allowing investors to bet on the famous NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournament.
• After that, Robinhood is expected to add other Kalshi markets, which include bets on egg prices, the highest daily temperature in NYC, and job data, among others.

Half-Court Shot

Unlike sports betting platforms, event contracts offer bettors greater latitude to cash out, with markets trading based on perceived odds. In this way, they’re a superior option to other betting options. And for Robinhood, the expansion could represent a serious opportunity.

• Robinhood realized over 200M trades on its Election Day market — exciting investors about the potential of its new derivatives business.
• Morgan Stanley says that the company’s new events contracts business could add up to $260M in new revenue per year, bolstering its earnings by 14%.

Betting on March Madness? Analytics were one of the biggest factors in building this year’s NCAA tournament lineup. Many will use data to guide how they craft their bracket or bet on this year’s tournament — whether it’s popular metrics built by institutions, such as ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI) or the NCAA’s NET rankings — or by increasingly popular metrics built by Ken Pomeroy, Bart Torvik, and Evan Miya. Of course, bear in mind they’re not always an exact science, but they’re worth a look.