DraftKings, the Boston-based daily fantasy sports company started publicly trading on Friday, after the company completed its $3.3 billion merger with Diamond Eagle Acquisition. Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel discusses.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Digital sports, fantasy sports-- some big deals getting done. And Dan Roberts is telling us about DraftKings and plans to come public.

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, Adam, DraftKings, which you remember was so controversial a few years ago, is a daily fantasy company. Everyone, especially probably in New York, remembers the legal battles between DraftKings and its competitor FanDuel, and various attorneys general, especially the New York Attorney General, former NY AG Eric Schneiderman. That was years ago. And then, of course, in May 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting. That allowed DraftKings and other fantasy companies to also start offering sports betting in states that have legalized.

All that said, the company now public, starting this morning-- not through an IPO, but because it sold to and merged with an SPAC, a special purpose acquisition company called Diamond Eagle. So Diamond Eagle was itself already public, went public back in May in a $400 million IPO, and was only public for the purposes of buying DraftKings. Now today, it changes its company name to DraftKings, and changed its ticker to DKNG. And the shares are up about 13% right now.

So a weird day for a sports fantasy company to go public, considering there's no sports. But we had the CEO, Jason Robins, on one of our earlier live shows today. And he said, well, we've got betting and fantasy contests right now on everything from "Tiger King" trivia to "Survivor" to iRacing, which is virtual NASCAR racing.

So it's a weird time. But, you know, it's not a traditional IPO anyway. There is none of the fanfare, no new money raised, no roadshow, no glam photos on the floor of the Stock Exchange.

So in the end, it was kind of appropriate. And it really ends up being just a capital event, because now DraftKings gets to put that Diamond Eagle money on its balance sheet.