77 Largest Casino Stocks by Market Cap 2017

As a rare Saturday post, here is a reference list of 77 of the largest listed casino, gambling, and gaming stocks on major exchanges as of January 2017.

Gambling and casinos are a classic “sin sector” of “vice stocks”, where “vice investing” is considered the opposite of “ethical investing”.  In an earlier post on my personal blog, I compare the performance of ethical vs vice stocks.  I also had posts comparing the number of visitors to Macau to those visiting China or India, and how Macau once generated four times the revenue of Las Vegas with half the number of visitors.

In summary, this is not surprisingly an incredibly profitable sector that does not necessarily need economies of scale, but certainly depends on volume for high absolute profits.  Return on assets for the sector are just over 10% with debt/equity ratios averaging over 1.0x, so not surprising to expect 10-20% returns from this sector if purchased at reasonable prices.  Of course, the 33 largest casinos with market caps over $1 billion are probably less volatile than the 44 smaller ones, but this was one sector where the western superstitious number 77 had to be used because I just didn’t have 88 listed casino stocks in my database: