What's a moneyline bet anyway?

0:01NPR.

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And I'm Waylon Wong. You know, there are lots of ways to gauge how people feel about the economy. We've got different indices of consumer confidence. The New York Fed measures household financial expectations. The list goes on. But we are here to talk today about one particular glimpse into the American economic psyche. It's an indicator that really speaks to our nerdy wordsmith hearts, and that is Investopedia's top terms of the year. That's right. Every year, the online glossary rounds up the 10 financial words and phrases that drew the most interest from its audience.

0:47It's a window into what economic topics people were super curious about. And this 2024 list has a bit of everything. Macroeconomics, corporate finance, cryptocurrency, and even sports betting. So today on the show, Investopedia's editor-in-chief walks us through 2024 in econ vocab.

1:13This message comes from NPR sponsor Zendesk. Introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone. With an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months, Zendesk AI agents resolve 30 % of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10 ,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesk.com. Investopedia has over 14 ,000 terms on its website. So to make the top 10 list for the year, a word really has to stand out.

1:51It has to be something that drew a lot of website traffic and in a sustained way. The fascinating thing about Investopedia and our readers is that everybody comes in through a different door. Caleb Silver is editor-in-chief at Investopedia. And what he means is that people typically arrive at Investopedia by looking for information on a topic. Caleb gets to see what questions people are typing into search engines that lead them to specific articles on the website. And in 2024, the number one term on Investopedia was inflation. Oy, oy, oy, oy. I know. We are still talking about inflation. But Caleb says what changed in 2024 was that people had graduated from Inflation 101 and they wanted more granular information.

2:34What was the inflation rate by president? What is the trend here? Why is it still around? Has inflation gotten better or worse over the last few years? So it wasn't just a search for the term itself. It was all the terms around it that paints a really fascinating picture of what was going on in people's minds. This was the year that a lot of people thought they might do something about it with their vote. Speaking of voting, there was an especially big spike in interest for another term around the second presidential debate. That's the number two term on Investopedia's list for 2024, which was, say it with me, tariffs.

3:06Now, we have talked a lot about tariffs on our show, so let's go to numbers three and four on the list, NVIDIA and StockSplit. NVIDIA, of course, is the semiconductor chip powerhouse that at one point last year became the world's most valuable company. As for stock split, that's when a corporation issues more shares to stockholders. So NVIDIA actually did a 10-for-1 stock split back in June. That meant that if you owned one share of NVIDIA priced at$100, you would end up with 10 shares priced at$10 each. You still own$100 worth of NVIDIA, just split up into more shares than before. Now, NVIDIA said it was doing this stock split to make it easier for employees and investors to buy into the company.

3:49You know, because each individual share is now priced lower than before. And Caleb says NVIDIA was the big stock split for 2024, but not the only one. If you look at when stock splits spiked so much as a term on Investopedia, it was right around the time that NVIDIA announced that 10-for-1 stock split. But it turns out that there was about 340-odd companies that announced stock splits in 2024, and some of them were pretty big, including Walmart. Now, maybe you find stocks boring and old-fashioned. Maybe newer or riskier kinds of investing are more your speed. The final two words on Investopedia's top 10 list are for you.

4:25Clocking in at number nine was Bitcoin, which went on an absolute tear at the end of 2024. Caleb says the run-up in Bitcoin's price last year sparked curiosity and FOMO among Investopedia's users. A lot of people maybe missed this on the first go-around. Now they're really interested because price always drives interest. Now, Caleb says the Investopedia team decided to start building up its glossary of crypto terms back in 2016. He and his colleagues wanted to get ahead of what they expected to be this big surge of interest. More recently, Investopedia made a similar decision with another area of finance that looked like it was blowing up, and that is sports betting.

5:05Now, Caleb is not equating gambling with investing, but he says these activities are related. We had this feeling that sports betting and stock trading were cousins that might show up at the same barbecue but weren't necessarily that closely related. But still, there was enough in there to realize that people were thinking about probability. They were thinking about outcomes. They were thinking about risk when they were thinking about sports betting, which are some of the core principles of trading securities. Now, this brings us to the final term on Investopedia's top 10 list for 2024. It's a sports betting term, Moneyline Bet.

5:40Now, Agent, was this a term that you knew? Because I will admit I had to look it up, you know, on Investopedia, obviously. I hadn't heard it before. No. I mean, when I heard it, I just thought of those, like, old pay telephone numbers that you call, like, you know, for psychics or whatever. So are you telling me you used to call up a psychic on a pay phone? I didn't personally, but I do remember the commercials. Is this how you spent the 90s? Yeah. Okay. Ms. Cleo, the Investopedia of her day, of course. Well, Caleb says Moneyline Bet was the entry point for a lot of people looking to get educated on sports gambling.

6:17All of a sudden, you go down the algebra hole looking to learn more about how this betting works. Now, as a total newbie to this world, I wanted to find someone who could really hold my hand. So we brought in a ringer. I was born in a huge hockey family. My dad put us all on skates literally immediately when we could walk. Annie O'Donnell is a sports content creator. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as Sweet Annie O.D. Her specialties are hockey and baseball. One of my love languages is talking sports, and now I get to live and breathe it. Annie's been immersed in hockey and other sports for basically her whole life.

6:54But it was only more recently that sports betting started to be a bigger topic in her world. Sometimes I'll scroll by something and I don't understand it. And if it's just not in my realm or I'm not interested, I'll be like, okay, not relevant to me. But in my space, when it's people around me, fellow creators, and even sports fans that are asking for this information, I said, OK, this is kind of the way the industry is starting to go. Annie ordered some books and read up on sports betting. And then she decided to try it herself. Now, she lives in California where real money sports betting is not legal.

7:25So she would Venmo friends in other states like five bucks at a time and ask them to place bets for her. Her first bets were Moneyline bets. The Moneyline bet is who wins and loses. So say the Bears are playing the Cowboys. If you're taking the Bears' money line, you are betting on them to win the game. So that's all it is. That's all it is. It's money line is the easiest way to bet on sports. It could be a complete blowout. It could be the closest game in the world where you are biting your nails to the end in overtime. But it's just win or lose. Of course, sports betting can get way more complex than that.

7:57And a lot of people are risking way more than five bucks at a time. Data from the American Gaming Association shows that sports betting revenue hit a record$11 billion in 2023. I'm willing to risk a cup of coffee for, you know, this little test here, but I'm not doing anything more. I'm not doing a pair of shoes. Even so, the sports betting industry has become unavoidable for content creators like Annie. She's done a couple brand partnerships with gaming companies, including DraftKings, one of the biggest names. And, you know, gambling did not just happen in the world of sports last year. It was also popular in politics.

8:32In 2024, online betting markets drew in billions of dollars of wagers on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Caleb Silver at Investopedia says the 2024 top 10 list reflects this convergence of all these forces around financial trading, gambling and politics. What we saw this year for the first time was this real merger of the world of sports betting and political betting with people betting on the election. And it also turned out that the betting markets were more correct than the polling markets. So this is the first time that happened, but I don't think it's going to be the last time.

9:06And this definitely won't be the last time we talk about inflation, tariffs, Bitcoin or sports betting. Willen, you got any bets on what this year's top terms are going to be? You know what I think will be big is disinflation. So, like, we're not talking about inflation going up. We're talking about the rate of inflation cooling, disinflation. Yeah. Not to be confused with deflation. Maybe this is something we can tease out in a future episode. Love it. This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with engineering by Jimmy Keely. It was fast-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kicking Cannon edits our show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

9:47I'm gonna drink these Mr..