tradesmart
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Gambling/Trading, there’s obviously a fine line between them, or no line at all……anything a trader who dropped $1.3 billion on an losing streak has to say may be relevant…..
Nick Leeson tells it his way….
"Every gambler must know this moment: the misguided confidence of a winning streak. The other day I had just such a moment. After cautiously building up £200 in a low-stakes game of internet poker, I decided to join a game where the stakes were 10 times higher. Within minutes my £200 had vanished. Welcome to the world of modern gambling.
It’s a world that is about to experience big change. Last week Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, announced a shake-up of the gambling laws that will herald, among other things, £1m fruit machines, and a big increase in the number of casinos.
There are now 126 casinos in the UK, but after deregulation there are expected to be double that. American companies are already putting their chips down in anticipation of a boom. MGM Mirage has announced plans to build casinos in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Salford. Other groups have plans for Newcastle, Sheffield and Olympia, London. Blackpool wants to turn itself into the English Las Vegas by building five super-casinos. According to some experts, gambling in Britain will never be the same again.
If I were you, though, I wouldn’t put my shirt on it.
There is nobody who has had more experience of the exciting ups and the terrifying downs of gambling. In the early 1990s I was working as a futures trader for Barings Bank in Singapore, making a great deal of money for clients by betting on movements in the Nikkei, the Japanese equivalent of the FTSE index. In one year I made £10m for Barings, 10% of the bank’s annual profit.
You know the rest. You might even have seen the film. Gradually, things began to go wrong. In simple terms, I bet $512m that the Nikkei would not fall below 19,000 points. And after a huge earthquake struck the town of Kobe, that’s exactly what it did. By the time one of the betting world’s greatest losing streaks had come to its disastrous end I had lost $1.3 billion.
What happened then was an exaggerated version of what can happen to any problem gambler. Life collapsed around me. My colleagues lost their jobs, I was jailed for five years, my marriage failed, and I contracted a cancer that was almost certainly stress-related.
Why did I do it? It’s the reason you will hear from any problem gambler. Admitting it to yourself and others is the most difficult thing. I could have stopped at any stage, but I could not turn and tell the people who were important to me: I’ve messed up.
It’s nearly 10 years since the collapse of Barings Bank, and it’s taken all that time for me to come to terms with it.
After that experience, you might think that gambling is the last thing I’d be interested in. But the truth is that there is a touch of the gambler in all of us. It’s what makes the economic world go round.
If you buy a house you gamble — sometimes rashly — that prices will not drop. If you set up a fruit and veg stall at the market, you gamble that somebody will come along and be tempted by your apples and pears. Our economy is powered by the gambles of investors on the stock market: they put money into a company in the hope that they will get more back.
We bet on the lottery, football, bingo. We might even buy a raffle ticket at the church fete in the hope of winning a bottle of sherry.
Now American companies are betting on a British gambling boom, and I suspect they will get their fingers burnt.
The number of casinos might well double over the next few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean double the number of gamblers. If 125 new casinos open in the UK, I suspect that 75 will also close down. This sceptical view of deregulation is shared by David Harding, chief executive of William Hill. “My view is that the UK is a mature gambling market,” he says.
Not convinced? Well, think of it like this. Las Vegas is a fantastic town with a lot going for it, but one of the greatest attractions is the weather. If it’s mid-November and I’m looking for somewhere to gamble, I don’t think Blackpool is going to be top of my list.
I do not find casinos very appealing anyway, because the odds are very much in favour of the house. I don’t bet on the horses and the dogs because I don’t know anything about them. But I do play internet poker, and have such confidence in the growth of this part of the market that I’m connected with an internet poker site, Celebpoker.com.
When you play poker online you are playing against five to 10 other players. You are making the decisions yourself. You are more in control. Whether you’re holding a deck of cards or a trading position on the market you are competing against like-minded people. You are pitting your wits against them and there is an adrenaline rush.
This is where the gambling bill could make its biggest impact. Some rival far-flung sites are unregulated and not policed well. The bill should ensure that only the reputable sites survive.
To gamble in a casino in this country you must first register, then wait 24 hours before playing. There is no such rule on the internet, which is why I think fears of a massive increase in problem gamblers — from 400,000 to 700,000 by 2010, according to one prediction — are misplaced. If somebody wants to gamble, all they need to do is turn on their computer.
Gambling got me into a lot of trouble, but I still enjoy it. I’m more careful these days, though. I only gamble with small amounts that I’m comfortable with, which might be good advice for the US casino giants. By all means stake money on a British gambling boom, but only if you can afford to lose it"
Nick Leeson tells it his way….
"Every gambler must know this moment: the misguided confidence of a winning streak. The other day I had just such a moment. After cautiously building up £200 in a low-stakes game of internet poker, I decided to join a game where the stakes were 10 times higher. Within minutes my £200 had vanished. Welcome to the world of modern gambling.
It’s a world that is about to experience big change. Last week Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, announced a shake-up of the gambling laws that will herald, among other things, £1m fruit machines, and a big increase in the number of casinos.
There are now 126 casinos in the UK, but after deregulation there are expected to be double that. American companies are already putting their chips down in anticipation of a boom. MGM Mirage has announced plans to build casinos in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Salford. Other groups have plans for Newcastle, Sheffield and Olympia, London. Blackpool wants to turn itself into the English Las Vegas by building five super-casinos. According to some experts, gambling in Britain will never be the same again.
If I were you, though, I wouldn’t put my shirt on it.
There is nobody who has had more experience of the exciting ups and the terrifying downs of gambling. In the early 1990s I was working as a futures trader for Barings Bank in Singapore, making a great deal of money for clients by betting on movements in the Nikkei, the Japanese equivalent of the FTSE index. In one year I made £10m for Barings, 10% of the bank’s annual profit.
You know the rest. You might even have seen the film. Gradually, things began to go wrong. In simple terms, I bet $512m that the Nikkei would not fall below 19,000 points. And after a huge earthquake struck the town of Kobe, that’s exactly what it did. By the time one of the betting world’s greatest losing streaks had come to its disastrous end I had lost $1.3 billion.
What happened then was an exaggerated version of what can happen to any problem gambler. Life collapsed around me. My colleagues lost their jobs, I was jailed for five years, my marriage failed, and I contracted a cancer that was almost certainly stress-related.
Why did I do it? It’s the reason you will hear from any problem gambler. Admitting it to yourself and others is the most difficult thing. I could have stopped at any stage, but I could not turn and tell the people who were important to me: I’ve messed up.
It’s nearly 10 years since the collapse of Barings Bank, and it’s taken all that time for me to come to terms with it.
After that experience, you might think that gambling is the last thing I’d be interested in. But the truth is that there is a touch of the gambler in all of us. It’s what makes the economic world go round.
If you buy a house you gamble — sometimes rashly — that prices will not drop. If you set up a fruit and veg stall at the market, you gamble that somebody will come along and be tempted by your apples and pears. Our economy is powered by the gambles of investors on the stock market: they put money into a company in the hope that they will get more back.
We bet on the lottery, football, bingo. We might even buy a raffle ticket at the church fete in the hope of winning a bottle of sherry.
Now American companies are betting on a British gambling boom, and I suspect they will get their fingers burnt.
The number of casinos might well double over the next few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean double the number of gamblers. If 125 new casinos open in the UK, I suspect that 75 will also close down. This sceptical view of deregulation is shared by David Harding, chief executive of William Hill. “My view is that the UK is a mature gambling market,” he says.
Not convinced? Well, think of it like this. Las Vegas is a fantastic town with a lot going for it, but one of the greatest attractions is the weather. If it’s mid-November and I’m looking for somewhere to gamble, I don’t think Blackpool is going to be top of my list.
I do not find casinos very appealing anyway, because the odds are very much in favour of the house. I don’t bet on the horses and the dogs because I don’t know anything about them. But I do play internet poker, and have such confidence in the growth of this part of the market that I’m connected with an internet poker site, Celebpoker.com.
When you play poker online you are playing against five to 10 other players. You are making the decisions yourself. You are more in control. Whether you’re holding a deck of cards or a trading position on the market you are competing against like-minded people. You are pitting your wits against them and there is an adrenaline rush.
This is where the gambling bill could make its biggest impact. Some rival far-flung sites are unregulated and not policed well. The bill should ensure that only the reputable sites survive.
To gamble in a casino in this country you must first register, then wait 24 hours before playing. There is no such rule on the internet, which is why I think fears of a massive increase in problem gamblers — from 400,000 to 700,000 by 2010, according to one prediction — are misplaced. If somebody wants to gamble, all they need to do is turn on their computer.
Gambling got me into a lot of trouble, but I still enjoy it. I’m more careful these days, though. I only gamble with small amounts that I’m comfortable with, which might be good advice for the US casino giants. By all means stake money on a British gambling boom, but only if you can afford to lose it"
