Financial Betting Articles

What is the world coming to when Ant and Dec get a fixed People's Choice award because Robbie Williams wanted to present them with a prize? I don't mean I'm offended by the fixing element. It's Robbie Williams rating them that highly. How could he be keener to meet those two comedy fur balls over Doctor Who's assistant, whatserface, the woman who used to be Catherine Tate? (I bet that if she had a pound for every time a producer pitched her a sketch show called 'The Tate Gallery' she would have retired by now. ("Then we could do a topical sketch show called 'The Tate Modern'. Then we could hook you up with a golfing legend and call it 'Tate & Lyle'... No, don't go, Catherine, there's more... A political interview show, 'Tate of the Nation...!' Was that a gun? Did you hear a gun? I thought I heard a gun...")

The point is, whilst lying and cheating might be fun, you do get caught out. Eventually. The bad news seeps out eventually.

HSBC - who don't lie and cheat, for the record - have got more bad news. (If the Sunday Times is to be believed it's $4 billion. If the Observer is to be believed it's $5 billion. And if the News of the World is to be believed Jade Goody's their next CEO.) The difference between HSBC and the People's Choice (Boris, shurely?) is that people aren't expecting bad news from the People's Choice awards. Bad television, bad choices, bad guest presenters, but bad news - no. The banks, however, we're all waiting for the last of the proverbial to hit the fan.

The Aegean stables that are the banks need a cleaning out. They need to fess up now about what they know. Or fess up that they don't know (my own personal theory). Still, from a trading point of view it's gold. This drip drip of "Oh yeah, we found another bad debt we didn't know about and that rights issue we said we would never do two weeks ago we're going to do in two days time and of course I'm the right man to lead a multibillion corporation" guarantees this market will bounce up and down and be a great place to trade/bet (is there a difference?).

Maybe Robbie Williams can be persuaded to put himself forward to present an award to the bank that can first look the world in the eye and say, "That's it. That's all the bad news. Now we'll focus on looking after your money." ("We could call it 'The Great Bank Robbiery'... erm, 'Rob Bank?' 'Take That Banks!' No, don't go, Robbie! Robbie...! Was that a gun? Did you hear a gun? I thought I heard a gun...")

Make sense of it all at ChoiceOdds.com

Things are still calm on the FTSE front, which has been trading in an average 81.2 point daily range so far in May, compared to 93.6 per day in April.

It's a similar story in Germany, where the DAX is only trading within a 77 point daily range compared to 110.5 last month.

But since the start of April, things are slightly more positive on the DAX - up 15 days, down on 13 days. The FTSE has closed down 15 times in the same period...

Light takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun, about the same time it takes me to drink a cider on a sunny day. Ergo, I drink at the speed of light.

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