Flutter entertainment

[megarain]

1 yr chart :

Ex-CEO - Peter Jackson to step down next month - love to see what payoff he gets

Down 10% today on weak Q2 earnings report. Delisted from UK to hide ?

flutter nosedive 5 aug.jpg

[Euler]

Not sure what to make of his time at the head of Flutter. He managed to give them a big push into the US and turn them into a Goliath, but of course they've continued to spend enormous amounts of money and not really seen a return on it.

[megarain]

He seemed customer-friendly, but the company is rapidly becoming non-existent.

Rightly, the buck has to stop somewhere.

I wish someone with a brain would buy the exchange and spin it off.

[tryingtotrade]

So what does it mean for the future of betfair?

[megarain]

IMHO US based companies will make the Betfair exchange irrelevant in 5 yrs, if not sooner.

If I was still in this for the long term, I would be looking at other solutions. The Uk gamblling landscape is just too political/regulated.

They are now too far behind to get back in. Toasted.

DK volumes.jpg

Pic is Draft Kings volumes - which shows the growth etc. Crypto grey site - Stake, also showed phenominal figures.

[tryingtotrade]

Could you easily switch your strategies to draft kings or other US platforms?

[megarain]

Pretty easily - and found other opportunities, without the headaches Betfair "customer service" provided.

If you can manage risk, there are possibilities everywhere.

[megarain]

Just saw Polymarket looking to float via IPO with a $20b valuation. Flutter currently $18b market cap.

[jimibt]

IMHO US based companies will make the Betfair exchange irrelevant in 5 yrs, if not sooner.

If I was still in this for the long term, I would be looking at other solutions. The Uk gamblling landscape is just too political/regulated.

They are now too far behind to get back in. Toasted.

DK volumes.jpg

Pic is Draft Kings volumes - which shows the growth etc. Crypto grey site - Stake, also showed phenominal figures.

The writing was arguably on the wall just after Covid, partly because of changing customer habits and then later because of various government and regulatory interventions. The old trust-based model has largely disappeared. When customers face increasing friction moving funds in and out of accounts, it's difficult to maintain the seamless experience that made exchanges attractive in the first place.

It's also been said many times on this forum that there has never seemed to be much understanding from policymakers of how a small number of highly successful exchange users actually operate. The current affordability and source-of-funds checks appear to be designed around the assumption that all high-volume customers are at risk gamblers. In reality, a small minority are effectively running trading businesses rather than gambling recreationally.

If that thesis is correct, then there's an irony here. Those users may represent a tiny percentage of the customer base, but they're often among the most active participants and are generating taxable incomes through their activities. A more nuanced framework could probably have addressed that distinction, with targeted checks that identify genuine problem gambling while allowing legitimate trading activity to continue with less friction. Instead, the broad-brush approach risks discouraging exactly the sort of liquidity providers that helped make the exchange model successful in the first place.

Whether intentional or not, the end result is that the very measures introduced to protect consumers may also have accelerated the decline of a model that relied heavily on a relatively small group of sophisticated users.