I research the market efficiency of the German 6/49 parimutuel lottery game using Stata. To this end, I investigate the existence of profit opportunities for particularly unpopular combinations of numbers (Papachristou and Karamanis (1998)), employing the covariates proposed by Henze and Riedwyl (1998). Furthermore, I examine the time series behavior of stakes bet in relation to the size of the jackpot in the respective draw. In particular, I attempt to verify the conjecture that the skewness of the payoff distribution drives bettors' appetite for participation (Golec and Tamarkin (1998)). Along the way, I show how one can set up Stata to retrieve data from the internet, unpack them automatically and shape them for the analysis. I also show how one can schedule tasks to automate the process further.
