Evil Knievil: Fines are fine

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Some years ago I had £200 on W.Mullins to be champion trainer at Cheltenham at 1/4. This was offered by Betway. I could not put on anymore for fear of panicking the horses.

Mullins duly won and I applied to Betway to withdraw £250. They let me have £200. I eventually had to threaten to sue for £50 before Betway disgorged the remaining £50. I have never had a bet with Betway since. And I am not going to. They are just an opportunistic marketing organisation comprised of smarmy creeps.

However, they are also prize s***s and yesterday they got fined £11m for improperly syphoning off lunatics’ substance. Had it been anyone else who got fined I would have been highly sympathetic to the bookie – my argument is that if your punter pays you as bookie £1m that is the punter’s right and your opportunity. But since it was Betway that had so behaved I immediately recognised the justice of it.

William Hill (LON:WMH) has been hammered as a result of the Betway decision and, far worse for them, there is serious talk that football matches and so forth are to be deferred for perhaps a year because of Covid-19. This is an overreaction and therefore an opportunity to buy. The prize remains the US online sports betting market. This is colossal.

*****

For some unfathomable reason gold has been sold down in line with the trend in equity indices. This is perfectly potty. The fact is that governments around the world will have to degrade their currencies to maintain demand and when that happens (in the UK it already has started) the rush to gold should be sensational. As I type, gold stands at $1,582. This is very cheap indeed.

Evil Knievil: