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Charlie, you wouldn't have an easier question to pitch at me, would you? The wonderfully effervescent market in gambling stocks from March '21 was, in hindsight, as OTT, as the current prices are downright pessimistic. The current market also stinks for practically all shares. That said, I consider that the gloom around US gambling stocks in grossly overdone.

The problem, imo, is a combination of uncertainty & a refusal by most PI's to believe any promises of 'jam tomorrow'. They're frightened by the enormous sums being spent on advertising & promotion to attract customers. MGM/Entain say they expect positive EBITDA (real profits) sometime during '23, saying that they're spending an average of less than $300 for every long-term punter they're signing up.

As always, I go back to hard numbers; The average US "Hold" (profit on turnover) is 7%, meaning that once the punter wagers $4,200, the bookie will have won $300, recovered his acquisition costs and moved into profit. $4,200 equates to $81 a week, or $16 a day, if you bet 5 days per week. IOW, relative peanuts for a serious fancier of the NFL or thoroughbreds.

Therefore, I'm expecting cash profits of hundreds of millions a year quite quickly, with a valuation of 10 times EBITDA, meaning a capitalisation of several billions. But, realistically, it's going to be two years until early '24, when we get the full '23 numbers and the analysts can choose a multiple.

In the meantime, we'll have to deal with the Gambling White Paper and the Foxbet arbitration result, neither of which will do anything for the SP until we get clarity and the current fog clears. I regard this as an opportunity to buy more at prices which, I hope, will seem laughably cheap in two years time - but, but, but, I have been wrong before. Isn't that the fun in life?

MGM produced a good set of quarterly results two days ago, beating t/o and profit expectations. The results disclosed nothing about the JV with Entain, except for 1 line, "The quarterly loss increased to $92 million from $60 million in 2021". Utterly meaningless!

The better news was in the Q&A session with analysts, where the CEO was extremely coy about the JV, refusing to provide any detail, other than he's very happy with their results and that the numbers will be publicly disclosed on May 12th.

Given that he he also confirmed that the previously announced big property sales had closed, making the balance sheet flush with cash and they'd made a takeover offer for a mid-sized Swedish gambling plc for $600 million, one wonders if MGM will come back with another offer, this time at a sensible price? Maybe even next week. Watch this space!

Cukkas, that's a really interesting March article from 'frontofficesports'. It's obvious that Foxbet are spending no money on their US operation and at 1% penetration, excluding Nevada, the business is worthless. This makes me wonder if the only reason they came into the FanDuel deal at all was to get the option to buy 18.6% cheaply and then flip it to FLTR later at future market value. That might explain why there's no settlement and it's going to arbitration. We don't know the wording of the Option Price Clauses, but given that Exercise Price is absolutely central to any option agreement, I'd be astonished if FLTR's lawyers agreed any vague wording that gives Foxbet room to seriously argue that they're entitled to buy at an historic and way-outdated number. I have, however, been astonished before at the seeming incompetence of highly-paid advisers to plc's, so that means nothing.

I've no idea of the extent of Fox's UK operations, but I do see adverts on ITV Racing and presume the company is ultimately owned by our dear friend, the lovable Rupert Murdoch. So there is money there to buy and hold an expensive 18.6% of FanDuel, though whether they'd want to do that for a junior-partner's sleeping investment, who knows?

I remain a very firm holder of FLTR, having bought in as a believer in the USA as transformational to any UK bookie plc who teamed up with the right local partner. The American tail is now well on the way to wagging the Irish dog. 37% market share is marvellous. Meantime we have to deal with the Gambling White Paper, which is bound to be accompanied by a media explosion of horror stories relating to problem-gambling. All of which is bound to affect the SP until we know exactly what is contained in proposed legislation. I cannot see HMG hobbling any business which provides not only so much employment in their own and the horse racing business, but also pays enormous amounts in taxes. Markets hate uncertainty, which may well extend beyond the next election, so this could hold the price back for some time.

Meantime, fingers crossed for DraftKings results and if we do see a FanDuel float in New York, after the arbitration is completed, then you could well be spot-on about the SP returning to £150. Of more importance to me, at the moment, is the £50 I've bet on Everton FC appearing in the Championship in August. That and Liverpool FC adding just one more piece of silverware to the cup they've already won would make this season a truly grand one.

Finally, it's good to see "Sain@Vision" in this column. I hope you're well. Fond memories of Intu.

There's a wonderful story on Yahoo Finance from last Friday about the number of mug punters in the US who queued up to back Tiger Woods to win the Masters at anything between 40-1 & 50-1. And they lined up in their hordes - FanDuel took more bets on Woods to win this year than they took on every player in the entire tournament last year. One loon wagered $15,000 at 50-1 against Tiger to win $750,000. 500-1 would have been a fairer estimate of his chances, imho.

I reckon Woods probably stood a better chance of winning the Grand National, which also must have been a equally profitable for Entain, although I'm concluding that we'll have to wait another year before the SP here begins to reflect the reality of the profitability of our trans-Atlantic ventures. The City seems to want to see cash on the bottom-line, and perhaps dividends too, before they'll pay good money for the public bookmakers. I'm patient and unworried about the upcoming White Paper, although prices will likely be volatile when it's finally released.

Meantime MGM will update the market with 1st Q results, after the closes on May 2nd.

Ha!! ROFLMAO to the man who put the "Con" in Citiconindex. Zilla is more likely to appear in a Playboy Centrefold than she is to pay £6 a share for Reach. £3.35 if you're very lucky, but I reckon it'll go a lot lower beforehand. Especially as the management are now demanding to be paid in gold bars. Hubris usually leads to Nemesis, as Señor PooInTheTin is discovering one month into his Ukrainian expedition.

. . . And sure enough, 19 days later, time-wasting Apollo prove that they're all mouth and no trousers. Unwilling to pay anything like full market value for Pearson. I hope the company prospers and the SP starts with a 9xx in 12 months time. Good luck.

At least twice in the bookmaking field recently with both William Hill and Entain, Apollo get themselves all hot and bothered letting it be known that they were going to compete with real bidders like Caesars for Hills and MGM for Entain.

And Apollo did nothing, except retreat with their tails between their legs. Not even a sniff of a counter-bid.

Pearson is a great turnaround situation. Has been for years actually, but this time it looks as if management have a recipe that might well work. But, as for Apollo and their highly conditional offers, in my opinion pigs will fly before this bunch of blowhards puts any serious cash down. Are they trying to put Pearson in play? I have no idea, but I will eat a small hat if we see a serious offer from them by 8th April.

CEO Steven Bird opens his report with, "This was our reset year". Hah! The SP was £3.11 in February last year. It's £1.98 this morning.

Thanks a bunch, Steven. With a success like this, I hate to think what you'd define a failure.

The merger of Standard Life with Aberdeen will go into the business-studies textbooks as a classic major example of Shareholder-Value-Destruction. Perhaps the biggest seen on the LSE this century?

Thank you Caspino for doing what Dame Edna's (Sorry, I mean Emma's) waterspout of platitudinous woffle, conspicuously failed to do, which is, show us the numbers. Based on your comments, I fail to see how the market could value Haleon at much more than £30 billion. Perhaps Unilever thought they could make gazillions of savings through synergies and so greatly increase profits by lowering their costs.

Perhaps the most damning comment is that the SP was £20 over 20 years ago. Throw in inflation and the SP is actually well under ten quid in real terms. I've held them for that long purely for income and diversification purposes, but now I'm actually paying some attention to this non-performance over decades, I think it's time for Dame Edna's End Of The Pier Show to be put out of it's misery with a Farewell Tour to the knacker's yard.

Hello again Cukkas. It would seem that the government wants to do a major review of the operation of the Gambling Act 2005. As such there is no agenda at present. Everything is up for grabs. Imo, there is a loud anti-gambling lobby in the Lords and Commons, but how powerful they might be is another matter. The lobbyists seem more inclined to generate heat in the form of emotional press-releases claiming that the UK has 400,000 addicted gamblers with little or no self-control, rather than providing some light, like publishing serious studies of how they arrived at that number.

I came across this article:

https://www.gamblingnews.com/news/niesr-tasked-with-modelling-gambling-harm-economic-cost/

The NIESR is a well-respected, politically neutral, independent UK institute that does both Economic & Social Research. They've announced that they're preparing a report on the benefits and costs of gambling, including gambling-related harm to individuals, communities and society generally.

The benefits, of course, being the money raised in direct tax, plus the income taxes raised from the tens of thousands of jobs provided by the bookmakers.

Personally, I'm all in favour of updated regulations based on hard evidence and proven facts. There's no doubt that gambling addiction is a serious problem for society, along with the other addictions of alcohol, drugs and tobacco. But there's also the consideration that tens of millions of Brits enjoy gambling without endangering their family's homes and finances and the industry is a massive supporter of another sizeable employer - horse-racing.

I'd be surprised if the White Paper is ready before this summer, and even if it is, legislation is probably two years away, which might quite possibly take us into an election year. The major review and resulting legislation will take years imho. But remember; I am often wrong!

My apologies, Cukkas. The story was in Sunday's Observer. The link is:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/06/uk-government-puts-off-review-of-gambling-laws-until-may

Caesar's are matching cash deposits 100% up to $300, but you've still got to make winning bets. I must admit, the thought never crossed my mind to sign up with everyone. That's greedy. Not to say foolhardy. I'd be scared to sit down in front of Saturday afternoon's football and racing, knowing that ! had deposited £2,000 and had £4,000 worth of firepower. That's probably why I'm content to stake the bookies to keep shaving a steady 8% off the gamblers and giving me a slice through their dividends and SP capital gains. The old story of the tortoise and the hare!

Yes, Cukkas, there was a note in the Sunday Times yesterday, saying that the report and White Paper had been put back to May.

Thanks for the note of NY turnover. With only one game left in the NFL, the NBA should carry the party through to March Madness, and then it's the relatively quiet time of year through the NFL playoffs and the regular Baseball season, until September when the NFL restarts the fun times.

I've been wondering why the US sports-book stocks have been steadily drifting downwards since last fall and have come to the conclusion it's for two connected reasons: 1) The US investor has no understanding of the bookmaking business (for obvious reasons) and 2) they see all the companies spending a fortune on television advertising to produce current very negative cash-flow. Meanwhile promising great profits in 2024, maybe. The amount of $3,000 per active gambler has been been bandied about, to buy market share.

So I'm concluding that SP's will remain unexciting for at least another year, until somebody declares a thumping profit. - At least that has always been my hope, to see major personal profits once the plc's have paid all the start-up costs and started to cash-in. Fingers crossed!

Today's update tells me that now is the time to park some spare cash, from a well-diversified portfolio, into Shaftesbury. It's festering at six quid, when it traded at ten at the end of 2019. We would seem to be slowly coming out of Covid. The tenants are, a tad slowly, back to paying their rent - 90% now collected for the Q/E 31/12 and 80% already banked for Q/E 31/3. Not perfect but greatly improved on 2020.

Yes, retail has taken a real kicking for all the well-known reasons, mostly the internet. But SHB has always been highly specialist; you can't go out for dinner in the West End online. If a few girlfriends want a fun day out browsing Carnaby Street, thats a very personal experience. So my view is that SHB will prosper, again provided Covid can be controlled.

In which case an SP return to £10+ within five years, as the discount disappears, seems a very reasonable risk worth taking. The daily gains won't be exciting, but an assured 50%+ gain within that timeframe, is well worth having, imo. We shall see what happens.

For years I've been mystified why VOD is considered to be a tech-stock. It's in a business which sells products that are 100% indistinguishable from it's competitors - a phone signal, a variety of smart-phones and a wifi-signal. No different from the electricity, gas and water products we buy from utility companies.

Utilities are bought almost totally on price. VOD has lots of competition. The Competition Watchdogs will never permit it to dominate the market. So where's all this "growth" coming from? You'll see no growth from a perpetual dog-eat-dog battle for market share, based on price, which makes no-one rich and some a lot poorer. As Buzby points out below; the market is up 1,000 points in 12 months and VOD's closing SP yesterday was just a fraction of a penny higher at 127p and change, from last February.

Nothing has changed in 20 years. They took over Mannesmann for £105 billion and today the combined entity is valued at £35 billion. Is this a record for Plc value-destruction? IMO, this stock is for dividend coupon clippers and traders only, as it meanders from lows around 110p, when pessimism predominates, to highs around 150p as the optimists get carried away by the promises of "Jam Tomorrow" from the latest CEO's half-yearly dollop of sweet-talk to the gullible.

It's a pure-and-simple utility and deserves to be valued as such. Don't be fooled!

Entain slipped out an RNS on Friday; MGM will be posting the 2021 results for the BetMGM/Entain joint venture in the US for the year just ended, plus the outlook for 2022, at 1.30pm London time. MGM will also hold a presser at 3pm and the RNS here gives the internet login address for that.

I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: First, MGM has never done this before; separating out the sports book results from the rest of the outfit, which will all be revealed on Feb 9th, according to the MGM website. Second, good news and good numbers always seem to be much easier and quicker to add up, than bad, which takes months.

So, my answer to Robina and Davie below, is don't hold your breath, but I'll bet we'll see the SP back over twenty quid early this year. This is exciting.

Stewart, it's important to realise that the so-called Buys & Sells are purest BS. It's done automatically by an algorithm, which claims any dealing price closer to the Bid than the Ask is a Sell, and vice versa. I trade most through Halifax because they get me really sharp quotes and many times, when I've been a buyer, this site records the trade as a "Sell" simply because my price was closer to the Bid than the Ask. Just ignore them.

Might I also suggest that you keep the faith in Entain. The NFL is having a record betting turnover season with some 20 states now open for gambling. The regular season has only a few weeks to go and the Play-Offs start in January. Then we're into the Basketball, culminating in March-Madness. For some reason US investors tired of gambling stocks during September and, like you say, the selling has been relentless. However, we can expect either a pre-close, or post-close statement around 31/12, followed by what, I believe will be, a spectacular set of annual results in very early March.

Whether or not MGM makes a bid in 2022 with all the cash they're raising from property sales (another billion yesterday), I confidently expect ENT to be north of £25 by this time next year purely on their trading results. I could, of course, be dead wrong, but I did recently "average-up" again on the current weakness. Something I've been doing since August 2017, when I first bought at £7.62 Either you believe that the legalisation of US Sportsbook gambling will be transformative for UK bookmakers crossing the Atlantic, or you don't. Personally, I'm convinced that will work out well for PI's, but a war in the Ukraine would likely prove me wrong. We shall see.

Well Charles, in a broker update today, Barclays' says 'Overweight' with target of £41.70. Deutsche Bank says 'Buy', target £45.12 and Berenberg go all-in with "Buy", target £52.25p.

That averages to £46.35 and if it gets anywhere near that in the next 12 months, I'll eat my hat and run naked down Threadneedle Street. Though on second thoughts, it might be a better idea if those of us who've been holders since 2018/19 each threw fifty quid into the kitty and bought Zillah several crates of champagne. She surely deserves that.

It struck me that there may well be other readers wanting to follow US (and Canadian) developments in the online gambling market.

One website I find very useful as it covers most of the states and most of the sports in considerable detail is SportsHandle:

https://sportshandle.com

If any of you have other interesting websites, please share. Just yesterday some wacky renegade judge tried to shut down all the online sports sites in Florida on a technicality.

Meantime fingers crossed. FLTR is seemingly in freefall with the SP at a two-year low & has got my trigger-finger twitching, because I reckon Jefferies opinion of a long-term £200 target is a valid one. Anyone for 'knife-catching'?

CJ, I pay zero attention to Ian Dumbbum-Smith and his parliamentary committee. They're a bunch of killjoys who believe we should all be restricted to a maximum bet of 50 pence each-way for our two permitted annual bets on the Derby & Grand National. Yes, there's a problem with the very small percentage of gambling addicts, just as there is with booze, nicotine & people who never come home from work. The bookies have taken enormous steps to protect compulsive-gamblers from themselves & they advertise these facilities widely to their customers.

Against that you have the Treasury which anticipates the receipt of billions in taxes every year, & whose own addiction to these tax receipts becomes ever stronger as Boris wildly spends ever more money. I can't see a situation where the Treasury would permit IDS & his committee to hobble the goose that lays their golden eggs. They simply can't afford it. The 97% of us who aren't addicted are too important for Rishi at 11 Downing Street to kiss goodbye to.

Meantime, us PI's are in the quiet period; no results expected until February, so no good news to take the spotlight off the killjoys. However, for those of us who are learning where to look there is actually lots of good news. The US states each have an obligation to publish their monthly gambling tax receipts. One of the earliest to legalise & one of the largest is New Jersey.

I read their monthly report ( https://www.njoag.gov/about/divisions-and-offices/division-of-gaming-enforcement-home/financial-and-statistical-information/monthly-press-releases-and-statistical-summaries/ ) & it shows nothing but great news; viz. In September, online sports betting was $82m, up 83% from $45m last year. October was likewise up 44% at $84m, compared to $59m last year.

The year-to-date totals to 31/10 are $642m wagered in total, up 128% compared to $282m to 31/10/2020. So the market is growing in exactly the way we all hoped, with a 6% to 8% profit margin on all those bets. BTW, the UK bookies have heavily marketed the accumulator in the US, known there as a 'parlay'. Their profits on these bets are a humungous 40%.

NJ taxes online bets at 15%. New York, which is just opening, has announced a 51% rate. I heartily recommend binging "Laffer Curve" for anyone interested in the efficiency of differing tax rates. This graph shows the amount of money raised compared to rates between 0% and 100%. Natch, those two rates raise nothing. No-one is daft enough to pay 100%, but where the curve goes between them is most interesting.

That was why Geoffrey Howe actually raised more income tax in the year he cut the top rates from 83% and 98% down to 40%. The big drop encouraged more people to work harder & earn more, because they'd keep a lot more.

I imagine that NY will look hard in a couple of years at how much tax they're getting per head, compared to their near neighbour, to the west side of the Hudson River &, if necessary, drop their rate.

There's a half-page article on the back page of the DT's business section today. He's a follower of Vladimir Putin, who believes in "managing democracy". Read wants a "managed market", IOW a carve-up between the three biggest players in each country, where they're allowed to make sufficient profits to reinvest lots of profits (read "waste') on new tech, pay his fancy salary and pay a good dividend to the shareholders. How very cosy, Nick - that's called a Cartel, where we don't really compete to screw the customers. We just carve up the market and screw the customers royally.

Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would invest in this debt-bloated tugboat. They engineered the biggest bonfire of shareholder value that capitalism has ever seen - the takeover of Mannesman in for £136 billion in 2002 to produce a flabby oaf valued at just £31.5 billion today. A textbook demo of how to flush over £100 billion down the Swannee.

Mobile telephony, for all it's attempts to convince investors that it's high-tech and there's pots of money to be made from connecting smartphones and pumping wifi into our homes, is nothing but a utility, like water, gas & electricity. We really don't care who supplies us, so long as the price is cheap and delivery reliable. There's zero brand loyalty. Assuming reliable delivery, the customer will always go where the price is lowest. That's why VOD got creamed in India.

That's also why Read wants a managed club of three owners per country. Fortunately for us, Ofcom is looking with disfavour on any more consolidation in the UK. But will PI's make any money from this market? Well, for several years VOD has been a buy at 110p and a prompt sell (even a short) at 140p as the SP oscillates between optimism and pessimism. Scarcely a growth stock, just a trader's.