JP: I introduced that when I realised how difficult it was and no one was actually telling anyone how difficult it was. I thought somebody ought to and that is really why I set the business up. The stockbrokers were sending out flyers saying how wonderfully easy it was, and they still do, saying come aboard this wonderful gravy train. There was nobody saying what trading was really all about, risk/reward, and stop losses…

BR: I remember coming to one of your seminars, many, many years ago. Probably about then, twenty years ago and you were talking about the technical aspects of trading and it really stuck in my mind with the graphs and the ceilings, the floors…

JP: I didn’t realise you had come to one of my seminars, blimey.

BR: It was sponsored by a stockbrokers you were involved with.

JP: Branston and Gothard?

BR: Yes.

JP: In that case it would have been late nineties I think. They went bust, as well, shortly afterwards. It was rather sad, they were closed up by the SFA for rather dubious reasons.

BR: They seemed very nice.

JP: They were, they were good people.

BR: OK, where were we?

JP: We had got to 1985/1987 when you started up. Are you still doing very similar things to when you started? What you are doing now, does it bear much relationship to what you were doing twenty years ago?

BR: That’s a very good question.

JP: That’s my job.

BR: What I did then. All I would do is bet and I had the blower in my house. The room was my office and the blower was like. It was the ancient version of the modern SIS TV screens. You had this commentary that the betting shops had and I paid to have that installed in the house so I could listen to the races. And I had a direct phone line, I paid about three thousand quid to have it installed, to my favourite mentor. I was putting on bets for him as well, but it meant I could pick the phone up and it would instantly ring in his house. It saved around 5 or 10 seconds (laughs), some of the old phones were rotary then. So I could say hi, what’s happening here, and we could discuss the race. I used to sit there betting, all day long. Listening to the races, I couldn’t see what was happening, couldn’t see anything.

JP: So were you relying on other people’s information at that point?

BR: Yes, and what I did was…

JP: Did you find that an interesting thing to do or were you a bit pissed off you were tied to…

BR: Not at all. The way I regarded it was I didn’t know anything about racing. I knew a fair bit about backgammon and I learnt a lot about money management techniques. I bought lots of share trading books, largely from America as there was not much literature in the UK. So I learned all about that but I didn’t know about horses, form, handicaps, and how to evaluate horses. People in those days, basically, they had it in their mind, they committed to memory and they knew from years and years of experience. And so I thought the best way is to form partnerships with them, so they profit from being with me and they knew which horses to back but they couldn’t get their money on very well. So I guaranteed I would get the money on, and I had a number of loose partnerships like that and a couple of guys I ended up paying a salary to and they would tell me their view of the races based on their twenty years worth of experience.

JP: If you had just chosen the best races, would that have been beneficial.

BR: Well. You know, the classic view of the gambler is you sit there, and you wait and wait and wait, and then you have one bit pounce. I’m sure there are people who do that and maybe in the olden days there were. But the point is in every single race there is a betting opportunity or a laying opportunity.

JP: But would you have information on each race?

BR: I certainly do now, in every race, and if I don’t have any information on a race I have some extremely good figures, and analysis, market analysis techniques, and so…

JP: But is there not some information which is very reliable, and some which is not so reliable.

BR: Yes, but if you said you’re a grade information returned 20% and you B grade information returned 15% and your C grade returns 7%. Why wouldn’t you want to use all of them?

JP: OK, so there is no holy grail as ever.

BR: No, and also there was one very good reason for trading a lot in those days and it’s relevant now, perhaps not so important, because you’re not speaking to people, and that is camouflage. So, if you went on, and you had a bet on a horse that was very strongly fancied, and another bet on a horse that was very strongly fancied, and another bet, the bookmaker would close you down. So I would make up little stories for the small bookmakers.

One I remember, in fact this chain knocked me back for around fourteen grand as well (laughs). I used to ride my horse, and I would go in, in the morning, in my jodhpurs on the way down to ride the horse and I would drop off and I would go into the shop and say (adopts posh voice) “Oh hello, do you take bets off people?” They would say “Oh yes” and I then said “that’s lovely, look I promised my wife that I’m not going to lose more than £1,000 a day betting any more. She’s asked me to cut back.”

And I had a Rolls-Royce outside. “Would you mind, if I leave £1,000 here and I ring up for a few bets. But once I’ve lost that £1,000 I don’t want any more bets that day. OK?” And they would rub their hands and say “certainly sir.” They soon realised that, actually, I was going to be taking money off them.

So that worked quite well. And then with other bookmakers, I found that if you gave them one bet, you weren’t going to last long, but if you gave them ten bets, they just assumed no one can possibly know about ten horses. And so they would keep taking them because it was a massive turnover and you could keep an account open for three months, two or three months, before you got banned.

JP: The first one you mentioned, did they go bust?

BR: Yeah, they paid me. They were a venture capital sort of bookmakers and they’d set up,

I think they had set up about ten or fourteen shops.

JP: In Oxshott?

BR: They had—the one I was betting was in Epsom. I forget where the other shops were.

I mean, I’d won more than the 14 grand. I think that was what they just ended up owing me, but before they went skint. It’s sad a lot of bookmakers don’t have much money. (laughs)

JP: It is a high risk business. They have got to cover their book quite well, otherwise they end up being exposed, and if they’ve exposed themselves once; and do it again and again and again. It will eventually come home to roost.

BR: Yes. I think fundamentally bookmakers are professional gamblers anyway, and a lot of them they like to have a bet themselves and they like to take a view. Especially if they’re a small bookmaker.

JP: Yes. The ones I know in my business are very risk averse and very conscious of what’s going on and—

BR: Bookmakers?

JP: Well, betting companies like IG Index for example, or BetsForTraders.

BR: Well, it’s slightly different because they’re so big. They just want to work the percentages, don’t they?

JP: IG can hedge on spread betting. They probably hedge on, well, they can hedge on horses, too. They cannot hedge on binary bats as it’s a little bit more complicated.

BR: It’s the same problem with all of them. I’ve got friends who do various spread bets and they can go on. I don’t do it much because I think it’s too big a margin, I don’t understand it. But they’ll go on and, say the maximum is £200 per point or £500 per point, and within a very short space of time they can only have a fiver a point; and as soon as they have the fiver a point, the spread moves massively because they use it, I mean, like all bookmakers, they use shrewd money to mark their card.

JP: So when you say they were on £200 per point, you mean they win and the betting company virtually closes them down.

BR: Yes, they won’t allow them to bet so, you know, if you’re a mug, then you go and open an account with a spread betting firm or a bookmaker, then as a mug, a new person, you can have, say, £200 per point. If you had been marked as shrewd, you are only allowed to have £5 per point.

JP: This is with sporting bets.

BR: All of them. Even the spread bets, but I guess they’re all on sports, yes.

JP: Okay, in the financial world they can hedge directly with the market. I know people who’ve bet over £1000 per point and have for many years.

BR: Well, maybe it’s a very liquid market, yeah.

JP: Yes, it would be, yes.

BR: That’s probably the big difference. I mean the sporting markets are not as liquid as—

JP: I was quite surprised when you mentioned earlier on that £2,000 was a big bet you could not place with one bookmaker.

BR: Well, it depends on the price to be honest. I mean, for example, if you over an account with William Hill and you are a clean "mug", you can back any horse to win ten grand, straight away. So if it was even money odds, you could have ten grand on it. If it was five to one, you could have £2,000. If it was one of my accounts, you could have a hundred quid (laughs). But they limit it, if you look a little bit smart, they put you down to 50%, then down to 25% then down to 10%.

JP: Okay. So how do you get by that now. I mean, you’re trading much bigger sums than that at the moment.

BR: Well, I bet a lot on BetFair and frankly I’m always trying to find—

JP: You don’t have any problems with BetFair.

BR: BetFair is not a problem at all. You can have what you like on BetFair. The only problem with BetFair is that very often the horses... on BetFair you’re playing with the other professionals—all the other shrewd people in the market. So if they fancy the same horses as you, you can’t get anything on it because they won’t try to back it as well. So the problem is, yes, you can get money on providing it’s on horses that other people want to lay. And usually, if they want to lay it, there’s a good reason. So you have tomanipulate.

JP: So what do you do when there’s a race? I mean and you’ve been racing today, betting today? Could you got through the procedures? As much as you want to. Obviously you don’t want to give away your trade secrets.

BR: I’ll tell you what I do, okay. It won’t really make much difference because you got to be quick to do it. I backed a horse of Mick Channon's today called Please Sing which is a un-raced juvenile. It’s been working extremely well at home. So I’ve gone onto BetFair, there’s no market. So the first thing you have to do is put a floor under the price. So you’ve got to put money up.

JP: So you place a bet on BetFair at a certain price.

BR: No, you can’t bet because there’s no money there. So what you do is you put money underneath the horse, in other words to lay it or support it. To make it look like you are a bookmaker or someone trying to lay it. Once you do that then other people looking at it think, “oh my god, people want to lay this horse, it’s no good,” so they will jump in front of you and put some money up. So now you can take the money in front. And there are robots...

(to be continued)

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