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Well… when I read the update it was kind of in line with what was expected. My last three months betting on sports was profitable so it was no surprise to me that they said results had been customer friendly. Revenue increasing is good although if customers have been winning they would bet more as they have winnings to bet with, so I don’t read too much into that. The American side of the business is still Flutter’s best part of the business by a long way in terms of potential. I would hope to see some good profits soon, I get that they have to spend a lot on advertising and promotions to attract new customers, hopefully in time that will be lucrative although will have to wait and see what obstacles the US government throw at gambling companies and how many competitors enter the market.
I think the drop today is over done but there is unlikely to be much news for a while now so I think the share price has more downward pressure on than upward momentum. Got a feeling this may slide back to £100 a share in the coming months but it’s a difficult one to predict.
*slight correction to the previous post. It is bet two £10 accas and get a free £10 acca bet. One per week.
Nice and interesting read Gewillia. They must have been good days, living like kings off the bookmakers must have felt good. There is a real excitement in doing that. Does the system still work in this current day? It’s always been a question I’ve been interested in - can the bookies be beaten?
I still maintain that Virginbet is the best sports betting platform (excluding the exchanges), the number of free bets they have on offer is ridiculous, they have a bet two £10 accas (4 selections with odds of 4.0 or higher) and get a free £10 bet. They have bet £10 on a single football match on Saturday and get a free £5 bet. Two Saturdays ago they had an offer of bet £10 on a particular race and get a free £10 bet if your horse loses (I won on a 12/1 shot that race). They also have free games you can win cash on. I wish now I had placed some big bets with Virginbet and Layed the same bet on the exchanges hoping to lose on the Virginbet so I’d appear to be a losing account.
I still bet on football daily but it’s not profitable long term, my main focus is pre race trading on the Betfair exchange. I’m studying pre race markets and trying to solve the puzzle, I’m hopeful.
It is as you say commonplace bookmakers closing profitable accounts. It is therefore surely a very lucrative operation if their customers are primarily losers.
My deepest sympathies, CJ. I'm afraid all bookies have always been ruthless in closing winning accounts. I learnt that lesson in 1965, aged just 18, as a student. I had a friend with equine connections and he taught two of us how to handicap 2-year-olds. Al's system worked. We learnt how to operate it and in short order we were shut down by Hill's, then Ladbrokes, and two big Liverpool bookies. The secret was to back one horse per day and back it hard, say, £5 or £10, maybe £20 EW, which was a fair amount of money in those days. And then leave all the other races, especially handicaps, alone.
With no credit facilities, the only way round the problem was to bet in cash. Each shop had their own limit, where they had to call their local head office if the bet exceeded about £5, to get permission to take or refuse the it. So the secret was to chat the staff to discover that limit and then later bet just under it. My diary recorded each shop's limit.
It kept me very trim as I spent my lunch-hours traipsing round the back cracks of Liverpool city centre dropping off four quid here and six pounds there. Our trio had a very profitable four years. My memory of our best flat season was my profit of £1,250 which enabled us to live like kings, going to the Henley rowing, skiing in Aviemore and Ascot for the Eclipse weekend. Then we all graduated, got proper jobs as an accountant, lawyer & surveyor, earned good pay and gave up trying to outwit bookmakers.
But it left me with a great love of both flat & NH racing that endures to this day. Where it's easy to place a £10,000 bet on a stock, but the returns are a much more conservative 8% compound.
It has to be so much easier today for bookies to track profitable accounts via their computers, but against that there is a great plethora of online firms. So I'm wondering if you went to the trouble of opening, say, a dozen different accounts and never betting more than once a fortnight with each, you might get away with running a profitable enterprise., by keeping under the radar. Also presumably the Betfair Exchange wouldn't fire you, would they? Anyway, I wish you Good Luck, whatever you do.
Hi CJ39, the behaviour of Virginbet that you described is on par to that to be expected from an underground bookie, is't not? So, I've to add another qualification now - a great user experience is not just solely the apps but also customer service too.
Well since I wrote a week ago saying Virginbet was perhaps the best app, I’ve been effectively banned from using them. I was around £330 in profit since I opened the account in the summer. I got an email saying my account had been reviewed and I was no longer eligible to enter any promotions and my stakes will be restricted (to pennies) on any bets I place. Shocking! This is nothing short of a disgrace that they can turn away customers who maybe taking money off them but it’s ok if Virginbet take money off customers. I’m fuming at that. I hear this is a common practice from all online bookmakers including Paddypower and Skybet which seems immoral. Thank goodness for the Betfair exchange where the bookmaker does not care if the punter making a lot of money.
I agree with Cukkas that the quality of the apps are a major thing when betting. William Hill’s app is really very good, the best by a long way. Betfair sportsbook is so ordinary, the odds are really poor compared to other sites and it’s just boring and lame. I think they need to market and advertise more or have they given up with the UK scene. Have you seen many adverts lately for the Betfair exchange or paddy power?
Sounds a lot more promising over in America with fan duel. I too am interested in seeing the profits this coming year as in the past it was showing as a loss as the cost of attracting and retaining punters was high.
FD and Dkng have a 80%+ share of the OSB market. Caesars and MGM have been very passive since the NY launch, leaving it as a carve up for the top 2. You'd expect new competition to emerge, let's see what Fanatics do. As you say DK have stolen market share from FD, parlays are where the money seems to be.
Hi Gewillia, it's valuable information to hear first hand experience and field report from an OSB app user's and investor's perspective.
Just out of curiosity, which OSB app does your son-in-law use, most of the time? Or does he have several apps on the go, as I suspect most do, hunting for the best odds or free bets available? My guess is that there is no such thing as loyalty among the user, which is fair enough.
BetMGM is not a happy ship at the moment, and things will come to a head in the near future, I suspect, as more internal squabbling is exposed publicly. Caesars is always going to be an also-run, as they are content on levering reward points to digital users, by mining their vast membership data base, luring them to their nationwide location of resorts. It's a shred marketing strategy of cross selling, I give them that.
The wide card is how the deep pocked Fanatics, with their huge marketing clout, does with their purchase of PointsBet back in July, thus giving them a ready made platform to enter the space. Discount merchandise at stores with every 5 bets, anyone?
To me, the surprising development in the past six months or so is how well Draftking (I was an one-time investor when it first listed) has turned around its once-money-losing system and control, now allowing them to make odd that make them money and increase market shares, at the expense of FanDuel primarily.
Very interesting comments from you, CJ, and Cukkas too. I've just got back from two weeks (three Sundays plus two Monday and Thursday nights) in the wild west of Alberta, where my son-in-law is a keen NFL fan, glued to US TV & streaming channels for his NFL fix.
I enjoyed the games, but was even more fascinated by the gambling ads. These told me that there are just four bookies left seriously in the US game; Fan Duel (Fltr), Draft Kings, MGM (Entain) and Caesars (Willie Hill). No-one else was advertising nationally, although they might be on the, much cheaper, local channels. My conclusion is that the battle for national market share is effectively over, with all the others having wasted their money and retired hurt. From now on the Big 4 will be aiming to maintain their positions.
Like you, Cukkas, I'm mystified by Fltr's & Ent's share prices. These days their advertising spend is way down, meaning that profits have to be way up, although we won't have the details until next March, yet the SP is closer to the floor than an ATH. The market seemed to take the postponement of the Fan Duel float badly. It's as if it suspects that the profits just aren't there.
I've always believed that the NFL is an Eldorado of gambling profits and started buying the big three Brits years ago. My expectation of steadily rising SP's over that time for Entain and Flutter has proved dead wrong, so I've continued to buy more, whenever cash is available. The result is a heavily skewed ISA portfolio. When the lads finally tear off their G-strings in five months time, all will be revealed. Either substantial and ever-growing profits will pump the SP's, or it's time to look elsewhere in the ISA. I still think I'm right, but then that's probably what the lemmings think too, as they sprint across the grass. We shall see.
Hi CJ39, I share your sentiment regarding Flutter's share price performance, which can only be described as lacklustre at best over the course of last two years since I held the stocks. Though I'm not a punter (not counting betting on the bookies' shares) I know the online sport betting bookies live or die by the quality of their apps. Good to get some feedback on that front from an seasoned user.
In every presentation, Peter Jackson talks the talk that they have the best in class for every aspect of the OSB, but they would be tested if they can walk the walk when the crunch comes in Q1 24, when they de-camp to a NASDAQ listing. Ironically the performance of their no 1 competitor is the key for them in the USA: if Draftking's share performs well then, I believe Fan Duel will be floated off separately, thus catapulting the parent company's share to old high again, hopefully.
Flutter is a bit of a conundrum of a share, it never seems to settle and trade within a fairly tight range. It went all the way down to £75 a share in July 2022 after what seemed like a year of steady decline. Then it had almost a year of constant gains reaching £165 a share. At present it’s back on the slide down to £130. I’m not sure which way this goes, will the slide continue like before? I really don’t know.
I like Flutter and I like that they are focused on expanding their American side of the business and around the world, all British betting companies should look outside of the UK for growth because the British side is difficult with our nanny state government always throwing obstacles in the way and the fact the market is so saturated with so many bookmakers.
The problem I have with the American side of the business however is that it has taken ages before it’s starting to make any profits and I do worry that FanDuel will in time lose a lot of it’s market share as more betting companies enter the market and America too have a nanny state where the betting companies will no doubt have to do everything to protect problem gamblers.
Also for those who bet on the Betfair exchanges, volumes are down massively compared to a decade ago, it doesn’t feel like the brand is thriving.
I also don’t know that many people who bet with Betfair sportsbook, paddypower or skybet. Right now bet365 and WilliamHill seem the most popular betting companies by quite a way. Perhaps the best betting site I use is Virginbet, the odds are definitely lower than William Hill but they do offer a lot of free bets. It’s just another challenge to profits needing to offer free bets to attract and retain customers.
Very interesting share IMO.
Off topic but for those looking for other gambling opps also, 888 tipped as a buy in Seeking Alpha today:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4629849-888-holdings-ltd-a-below-the-radar-sports-betting-
Reply
Neither Flutter nor 888 paid any dividends in 2022, Entain paid less than 1%.
Why bother?
888 seems to offer much better value now than Flutter or Entain
Flutter trades at about 3x Revenue
Entain trades at about 2x Revenue
And 888 is only trading at about 0.25x Revenue
And a forecast PE of only 3
So the 888 share price could easily rise by about 300% without looking expensive
So earnings were great, strong growth where is matters in the U.S.
So, why the dump?
Another post saying its Disney jumping into the space, but that should, and will imo, be a positive effect on the industry.
I think it was the confirmation of a US listing, which i suppose acts like a dillution, if not technically. Long term a us listing will push the SP higher, greater liquidity and more exposure to the growing hype on us sports betting.
Not sure what else it could be, as the guidance was fine also.
With great respect, I disagree with Taverham and Cukkas. Penn is a casino and racetrack enterprise with over 44 assets. It has made a very half-hearted attempt to get into bookmaking. Last I looked, it's market share was 3%.
Disney is today partly a real-estate operation, looking for sites to build and expand hotels, with, and without, attached casinos. Penn's asset-heavy base is right up their street.
FLTR has fallen today because expectations of the float of Fan Duel on the NYSE have been postponed until the year-end, or more likely, just after, instead of during the fourth-quarter, imo. So postponing what should give an enormous boost to the SP.
But with 47% of the US bookmaking market, FLTR is on track to be a world-wide colossus and very profitable. I see this slight dip in the SP as a buying opportunity.
Disney is getting involved in this market according to bloomberg - hence the drop here.
I think this will bounce tomorrow once the analysts look through the numbers.
This news overnight is the cause:
https://www.ft.com/content/8ef5b93e-4e59-4ab2-87a9-451d2c92932b
Disney’s ESPN moves into US sports betting with $2bn Penn Entertainment deal
Cable network agrees tie-up with casino and online gambling group that displaces Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sportsbook
Penn will rebrand its US sports betting portals to ESPN Bet under the terms of a deal announced on Tuesday © AP
Disney’s ESPN moves into US sports betting with $2bn Penn Entertainment deal on twitter (opens in a new window)
Disney’s ESPN moves into US sports betting with $2bn Penn Entertainment deal on facebook (opens in a new window)
Disney’s ESPN moves into US sports betting with $2bn Penn Entertainment deal on linkedin (opens in a new window)
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Disney is pushing into the US sports betting industry, tying its ESPN cable network to the casino and online gambling company Penn Entertainment in a $2bn deal.
Penn would rebrand its US sports betting portals, available in 16 states and currently known as Barstool Sportsbook, to ESPN Bet, the companies said on Tuesday. The move comes less than six months after Penn completed a $551mn acquisition of Barstool, the sports gambling and entertainment site founded by Dave Portnoy in 2003 and which has become known in the US for its boisterous and occasionally controversial commentary.
Under the terms of the agreement, Penn will pay ESPN $1.5bn in cash payments over a 10-year term and grant $500mn in warrants for Penn stock. The rebranding will take effect this autumn.
Penn will sell the entirety of common stock in Barstool back to Portnoy “in exchange for certain non-compete and other restrictive covenants”.
The deal between Penn and ESPN is a watershed moment for Disney’s sports cable network as it continues to build out its streaming platform ESPN+ and it has tapped advisers to examine its options.
In a video statement posted to his Twitter account, Portnoy alluded to “hit pieces” by The New York Times and Insider as among the reasons for the divestiture and said Barstool and Penn were “denied licences because of me”.
The New York Times in 2022 profiled Portnoy as someone who promoted irresponsible gambling, while the previous year Insider spoke with several women who accused him of sexual misconduct.
“We underestimated just how tough it is for myself and Barstool to operate in a regulated wor
Market disappointed that outlook only 'broadly in line' with expectations?
Great results out today , should lift sp today - we shall see.
Thanks Treven.
Today's announcement:
Flutter Entertainment plc (the "Company") Notice of 2023 interim results
The Company will release its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2023 on Wednesday 9 August at 7.00am (BST). A presentation will be made available on the corporate website (www.flutter.com) at 8.00am and the Company will also host a Q&A conference call for institutional investors and analysts on the same date at 9.30am.
Probably the USA data released today afternoon? IMHO. The whole Market is down.