Apart from betting hundreds of millions of pounds on the financial markets (admittedly with mixed results), Nick Leeson also loves to spread bet on football. Here, he shares his thoughts on Euro 2004, and tells his detractors where to get off.
It seems that my writing for this magazine has attracted interest from other facets of the British media. Some have even questioned the probity of my involvement. One paper quipped that ‘Leeson offering advice on betting is like George Best signing for The Publican newspaper!’ Well George, good luck with the new venture! Some people just don’t have a sense of humour, do they?
I live on the lovely west coast of Ireland now and on one of my irregular jaunts with the wife to the local boozer, a rather sozzled regular walked up to me, moved my wife aside, draped his arm around me and summed up the whole Barings story in his own words: ‘If they can’t take a joke, feck ’em.’ That journalist, who obviously hadn’t read my piece in the fi rst issue to see that I hadn’t actually given any advice, can do the same.
To make them happy though I will offer one piece of advice this month – if you are ever leafing through this magazine and see me offering share tips, put the magazine down, walk away, ask someone to destroy the offending page and then you can safely return to your reading.
As I write this article a month before it comes out, it’s a little diffi cult to think of something that will be current when you read it. It reminds me of my days in Singapore. Often, sitting on the trading floor during a lull in the market or sitting in the office looking for something to do, I’d turn to the spread betting markets. I did this more to engage a passion that I have for football than anything else but the novelty of some of the bets that you can have really grabbed my attention.
Spread betting offers variety and rewards far greater than those found at traditional, fixed-odds bookmakers. In those days there were only one or two firms offering prices but now you are spoilt for choice. The odds compilers quite often used to make mistakes that you could exploit but that rarely happens now and over the last 10 years they have got it down to a fine art.
Before then, some of the spread betting firms’ markets were wide open to manipulation. For example, they used to take bets on the time of the first throw-in at a football match. Someone I know who used to play for a Premiership club would receive the ball from the kick-off and boot it straight into the stands. My mates and I would all have lumped on by selling the time of the first throw-in (which was always quoted in seconds) chalked up by the spread firm and leave the game after less than a minute to collect our winnings. Nice work if you can get it.
The spread firms are now regulated by the FSA for your protection and you’re warned that ‘Spread bets carry a high level of risk and only speculate with money that you can afford to lose, blah, blah, blah.’ But they haven’t cleared up all the areas of manipulation and it seems to me the yellow and red card market is obviously open to abuse. Have you ever wondered why some of these last-minute, senseless sendings-off occur? So did I, until I met a certain centre-forward who wasn’t against throwing an elbow or two in the last couple of minutes if the result was in no doubt.
In essence, spread betting works in a very similar way to the futures products that I used to trade in Singapore: you take a position, choose how much you want to risk per movement in the market and watch very carefully. They can seriously damage your wallet – something else I know a thing or two about – if you don’t pay attention and place effective stop-loss orders to limit your maximum exposure.
Euro 2004 takes place in the summer and I have been looking at some of the early prices. The outright favourites are France, slightly surprising after their performance at the last World Cup, followed by Italy, Portugal, Spain, England and Holland in that order. Every one of those countries has been tagged as the ‘nearly men’ of football in recent times and have regularly underachieved at major tournaments.
None of the groups looks that easy to me. Latvia are the rank outsiders at 500/1 with Paddy Power and Blue Square but are still capable of an upset after dumping Turkey out in the play-offs. They are not going to win but may make their group awkward for one or two teams. I don’t think home advantage will be sufficient for Portugal from what looks like a hard group with Spain, Russia and Greece and would sell them at 40 with www.bethilo.com (winner: 100, runner-up: 75, losing semi-finalists: 50, losing quarter-finalists: 25, others: 0). Potentially the easiest qualification from the group stages will be Holland, who you can buy at 37 with www.bethilo.com and www.igsport.com, and who will benefit from an easier quarter-final draw.
But don’t forget this advice is coming from a man who lost £862m for Barings Bank and managed to add another 900 chocolate bars to that total by betting on football matches when he was in prison in Singapore. Be lucky, because I never was!
