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I’m better off under Brown

by Tom Nuttall / July 2, 2007 / Leave a comment
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I’ve started the week £50 better off thanks to a canny spread bet I had placed on Labour’s likely performance at the next general election. A few months ago, anticipating a “Brown bounce” once the chancellor moved into Number 10, I placed a bet “buying” Labour seats at 283, which meant that for every seat over that number that Labour gained at the next election, I would win my stake of £7 (Mike Smithson over at politicalbetting.com has a rather more eloquent explanation).

The good thing about spread markets is that you don’t need to wait for the outcome of the event in question to cash in—you can profit simply by taking advantage of the movement of the market. This is why I was able to make money from the Brown bounce without having any particular view on how Labour is likely to perform at the ballot box. Once the effect of the bounce had become clear in published opinion polls, the markets started to move in Labour’s favour, and I was able to “sell” my bet at 290, making myself a tidy profit of £49 (290-283=7, multiplied by my £7 stake).

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Comments

  1. Prospect reads at First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog
    November 30, 2007 at 17:29
    [...] Tom Nuttall  ”Goodbye to All That,” in the Atlantic Monthly, by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan has been cheerleading for Barack Obama’s candidacy for months on his blog the Daily Dish. In this article he weaves together the various strands of his case for Obama—his ability to transcend America’s sclerotic baby boomer post-Vietnam culture wars, his confidence in combining a strong moral sense and religious faith with public expressions of doubt and scepticism, and the soft-power effect that having a mixed-race president who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia would have on those around the world who increasingly distrust America’s motives. At the time the article was published, Obama looked like a busted flush and Hillary Clinton’s path to the Democratic candidacy looked inevitable; now a series of assured public performances by Obama have opened up the race again in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. As someone who finds Obama the most inspirational presidential candidate in years, I certainly wish him all the best (and not just because I’ve got a fair bit of cash riding on him). [...]

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Tom Nuttall
Tom Nuttall is Europe channel editor at the Economist
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