Gaming stocks had a tough first half, and the Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF, which invests in a basket of gaming companies, underperformed the S&P 500 Index. Despite last week’s 3.5% gains, BETZ is down over 9% for the year.
Robinhood and Genius Sports were among the major gainers last week, while Rank Group Plc and Gambling.com were among the major losers.
Major Gainers
Robinhood (NYSE: HOOD) +20.6%
With a gain of over 20% last week, Robinhood was the best-performing gaming stock in our coverage. Incidentally, the stock is now nearly breakeven for the year following last week’s gains. Last week, Robinhood officially deployed Robinhood Chain. Built as an Ethereum Layer 2 network utilizing Arbitrum technology, it aims to serve as an institutional-grade framework for on-chain financial services.
The company also announced several new initiatives, including Robinhood Earn, its decentralized lending product, and new stock tokens, which enable around-the-clock trading directly on the Robinhood Chain.
The company also announced that it is now officially available in Canada and announced plans to launch crypto trading in the U.K.
Robinhood has been diversifying its business beyond stock and cryptocurrency trading. Prediction markets have been a key driver of growth for the popular retail trading app. Notably, while Robinhood’s cryptocurrency trading business sagged in Q1 2026, its prediction market business continues to flourish.
Genius Sports (NYSE: GENI) +18.20%
Genius Sports rose over 18% last week. The stock has been quite volatile in recent weeks despite no major company-specific news. Last month, it announced a sponsorship agreement with LIGA MX (the top Mexican football league) and Polymarket for the U.S. territory. As part of the deal, Polymarket would be the official and exclusive prediction market partner for LIGA MX in the U.S.
Genius will be the engine behind this deal, supplying official LIGA MX data to Polymarket to create and settle sports prediction market contracts. It will also handle integrity information-sharing services.
This signals a highly lucrative new revenue stream and establishes Genius Sports as a vital infrastructure provider for emerging, rapidly scaling prediction markets, opening up a massive new frontier beyond traditional sportsbooks.
There are also lingering concerns over the massive $1.2 billion acquisition of Legend, which was predominantly financed by debt – an $825 million term loan and a $220 million revolving credit facility.
Meanwhile, while many analysts have been skeptical of the acquisition, Genius Sports has been quite upbeat on the deal and believes that it would be immediately accretive to its group-adjusted EBITDA margins.
Sea Limited (NYSE: SE) +16.05%
Sea Limited stock rose by over 16% last week, helping it reduce its year-to-date (YTD) losses to 19%. There wasn’t any major company-specific news last week, and the jump came amid gains in Asian stocks traded on U.S. stock exchanges. Also, there is some bottom-fishing in the SE stock as it has lost over half of its market cap from the 2025 peaks.
Previously, in June, Sea announced a partnership with OpenAI to boost artificial intelligence adoption in Southeast Asia and Brazil, which are its key markets.
Major Losers
Rank Group Plc (LSE: RNK) -9.73%
With nearly a double-digit decline last week, Rank Group was the biggest loser in our coverage of gaming stocks. Last week’s decline was largely driven by macro headwinds. Notably, Rank, which operates Mecca Bingo and Grosvenor Casinos, is highly sensitive to shifts in the U.K. consumer recovery. Recent consumer data has kept investors cautious about whether the frequency of venue visits and spend per head will remain resilient.
Moreover, there are fears that Andy Burnham, who is expected to become the next U.K. prime minister (PM), might increase taxes on physical casinos and adult gaming centers (AGCs).
Notably, while Chancellor Rachel Reeves, whom Burnham is expected to replace once he is elected as the PM, increased taxes on online casinos in last year’s autumn budget, physical slot machines available were spared a tax hike.
The Social Market Foundation estimates that doubling the duty on higher-stakes Category B machines, which allow £2 spins every 2.5 seconds, would raise between £275 million and £458 million in taxes for the government. While the money would help bridge the government’s spending deficit, it would be an added cost for the casino sector.
Gambling.com (NYSE: GAMB) -7.41%
Gambling.com extended its dismal run and fell 7.4% last week, extending its YTD decline to over 63%. Nothing much has been going right for GAMB, which has been battling changes to Google’s search algorithms that have severely hurt the company’s organic visibility. To offset the loss of this free organic traffic, the company had to rapidly scale up paid marketing channels, which has compressed its profit margins.
Last week, it was officially dropped from the Russell 3000 Index. When a stock is removed from widely tracked indexes, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and institutional mutual funds that mirror those indexes are legally required to automatically sell off their shares. This creates a massive wave of forced institutional selling pressure, dragging the stock price down.
Entain Plc (LSE: ENT) -6.02%
Entain Plc also unsurprisingly made it to last week’s top losers as investors sold off U.K.-based gambling companies over the feared tax hike. On June 25, the company also announced a phased exit from its Central and Eastern Europe (Entain CEE) business, beginning with a 20% stake sale to its joint-venture partner, EMMA Capital, for €425 million. The company intends to use the funds to pare some of its outstanding debt and expects the transaction to be largely neutral to its adjusted cash flows and EPS.
Despite the immediate pressure on shares, credit rating agencies view the move to exit the CEE market as a positive step for Entain’s long-term solvency. Fitch Ratings revised Entain’s outlook to Stable from Negative (affirming its ‘BB’ rating), noting that the proceeds from the CEE sale will successfully help management bring the company’s leverage ratio back below its target of 3.0x.
Major Gaming Industry Developments
Last week, the UK Gambling Commission hit Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited with a £900,000 penalty for social responsibility failures. Stateside, Ohio lawmakers introduced a landmark bill named the “Save Ohio Sports Act,” aimed at completely repealing online sports betting in the state.
The bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. Jonathan Newman, said in his statement, “Monetizing addiction to fund public education is the wrong direction for Ohio.” He added, “Who wins when predatory gambling preys on the vulnerable? It’s not our schools; that’s for sure! It’s the trillion-dollar big gambling companies who win. How is this good for Ohio?”
Prediction Market Developments
Talking of prediction markets, Coalition for Prediction Markets, a lobbying group of Kalshi, Crypto.com, Robinhood, and Coinbase, is pressing 20 states’ auditors to investigate ongoing efforts to restrict prediction markets, alleging that states are working with casino lobbies to hurt their business.
The battle over regulating prediction markets is far from over, and after a Michigan court barred Kalshi from offering sports contracts in the state, a corporate lawyer, Ariel Givner, said that the battle would end up in the Supreme Court.
The regulatory uncertainty extends beyond U.S. borders, and last week, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a strict, formal warning to financial firms stating that, because event contracts have a binary outcome (you win a fixed payout or nothing), they are technically binary options.
Under existing E.U. consumer protection rules, marketing, distributing, or selling binary options to retail clients is explicitly prohibited. Furthermore, ESMA reminded platforms that even if they target non-retail (institutional) clients, they must hold an official investment firm authorization. This marks a major roadblock for prediction markets trying to capture the broader European retail audience.
Meanwhile, prediction market volumes have exploded amid the ongoing FIFA World Cup. Kalshi’s trading volumes hit $31 billion in June (a massive 70% jump from May), while Polymarket hit an all-time record of $10.8 billion. A newer platform called Rothera, which was launched only last month, also quietly secured $2 billion in volume.
What Should Gaming Investors Watch This Week?
The National Council of Legislators from Gaming States meets in San Diego this week. This is a critical regulatory touchpoint for investors in digital sports betting and iGaming companies as U.S. state-level legalization frameworks are discussed.
While data points from FIFA wagers would be closely watched this week, the attention would also shift towards corporate earnings next week. Among others, we’ll get to hear about the revenue impact from the FIFA World Cup during the earnings calls.
