Markets In Everything: Invest in your Star Athlete

How about investing in a financial security linked to the income stream of financial performance of your favorite professional athlete? 

From Deal Book New York Times: 

First, there was old-fashioned gambling on football. Then came the fantasy leagues. And now, thanks to Wall Street, fans can buy a stake in their favorite player.

On Thursday, a start-up company announced a new trading exchange for investors to buy and sell interests in professional athletes. Backed by executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the sports world, the company plans to create stocks tied to an athlete’s financial performance.

After considering a number of possibilities for its inaugural initial public offering, the company found a charismatic candidate in Arian Foster, the Pro Bowl running back of the Houston Texans. Investors in the deal will receive stock linked to Mr. Foster’s future earnings, which includes the value of his playing contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees.

The company, Fantex Holdings, has grand ambitions beyond a Foster I.P.O. — it hopes to sign up more football players and other athletes, as well as celebrities like pop singers and Hollywood actors.

This is demonstrative of the market’s innovative process at work. Entrepreneurs think up ways and means to profit from what they see as economic opportunities by taking risks through the introduction of new instruments, products or services.

Innovation is a common feature of capitalist societies. As Austrian economist Robert Higgs pointed out

In his justly famous 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter described the dynamics of a market economy as a process of “creative destruction.” In his view, innovation—“the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates”—drives this process. Its most important result is that for the first time in history, the mass of the population in developed countries enjoys a standard of living that even the aristocrats of past ages could scarcely have imagined, much less have actually had.

In the above case, stocks linked to celebrities seem like a new form of entertainment.