Holiday Season

About Holiday Season

Lottomatica and Cirsa have agreed a blockbuster merger that would create the second-largest listed gaming and sports betting operator in the world.

Announced on Wednesday, the all-share deal is expected to close in Q2 2027, forming a combined group with a pro forma adjusted EBITDA of around €2 billion ($2.3 billion).

Cirsa’s implied pro forma value, before synergies, corresponds to an multiple of approximately 6x its expected 2026 EV/EBITDA which will be between €800 million and €820 million, according to the operator’s most recent earnings.

How to play Holiday Season

Playtech CEO Mor Weizer on Thursday said the supplier was expecting to launch in Brazil early next year despite political uncertainty impacting its deal with Caixa.

In 2025, Playtech agreed a partnership to provide a platform for the launch of Brazilian state-owned bank Caixa’s betting operations.

Weizer previously said the Caixa tender could be “one of the most significant opportunities for Playtech for the coming years”.

What is Holiday Season?

For the right audience, likely professional traders and sophisticated retail investors, the CME futures on FutureSports indexes could amount to “Goldilocks” offerings because the derivatives aren’t standard sports bets nor are they carbon copies of the event contracts traded on prediction markets.

The MLB and NHL futures contracts could be deployed by big-money bettors as hedges on various team exposures over the course of those leagues’ seasons.

As for the regulatory outlooks for the ETFs, the SEC hasn’t publicly commented on the NHL funds’ fates and it’s too early to tell what will come of the MLB filings, but there are hundreds of futures-based ETFs on the market today.