I spent the majority of the 2012 baseball season in Las Vegas betting on baseball games. I wasn’t there on a hedonistic bender or suffering from a midlife crisis. I was running a baseball-centric hedge fund.

After an accident curtailed my 15-year career as an equities trader on Wall Street, I relocated to Las Vegas to run a fund based on a model that used advanced baseball statistics - - known as Sabermetrics -- to bet on games. I came away convinced that if Las Vegas adopted some of the best practices of Wall Street, it could carve out a significant niche in the multitrillion-dollar business of asset management.