Bad news for regular players of BOTB I’m afraid. If you’ve been a loyal player (like me) for the last 15 years or so you could have bought any car you fancied and still had change left over.
If instead of buying £30 worth of tickets each week (which is probably on average about right for me), you would have (as of 19th May 2020) a whopping £350,000 worth of shares. That’s based on you buying shares through Hargreaves Lansdown and paying the £11.95 transaction fee for each deal. In total you’d have made 719 deals, paying nearly £8,600 in commission. The cost of buying those 45,447 shares would have cost you a princely £21,570.
I absolutely love BOTB, I think it’s one of the greatest games in the world. I know I’m not going to win, but I still can’t help how I think I’d react if Christian ever popped round with his camera crew one Tuesday morning.
BOTB, has absolutely captured the obsession people have with:
a. cars
b. the thrill of losing
Firstly people are absolutely obsessive about cars, especially ones they can’t afford. Even if they can afford them there are many other things that have to be priorities above a sports car. School fees, family holidays, rent, mortgages, children’s shoes.
Even if you could, in theory, buy a sports car on tick, most people would rather spend £5k a year on a glorious summer holiday than GTR repayments. After all, memories last forever, a sports car costs a fortune to run, is highly impractical and if we’re honest is never really going to get used.
Secondly, gambling is still fun if you lose. Ok, BOTB is not strictly gambling because you are playing “spot the ball” which is a game of skill and therefore not classed as gambling by the Gambling Commission. But, nevertheless, you still pays your money, and you take your chances”.
As stated by Mark Griffiths on the BBC, who conducted a study on gamblers at the Nottingham Trent University
Even when you’re losing while you’re gambling, your body is still producing adrenalin and endorphins.
The trill of maybe winning is almost as powerful as when you win. It’s why the roulette wheel is so addictive. All you have to do is watch any video of a BOTB being surprised, they all say how they’ve played the moment over in their head over and over again.
Anticipation is a powerful draw!
But anyway, the problem is that gambling is fun (until the fun stops, then you must stop) and long term successful investing is boring.
Talk to any fund manager, read any investment book or look at the track record of any investor that actually makes money. The key to investment success is to invet and do nothing.
Why am I saying this?
Because, if you’ve been trying to win BOTB and playing each week with the intention of betting a little and winning a lot, you should have been investing a little, doing nothing, then you by now could have bought a brand new Ferrari and still had a decent chunk of change for family holidays, paying off some of your mortgage, and sending your children to private school.
BOTB first listed on AIM in 2006 the shares in 2006 and had a bit of a shakey start, but recently, especially since the boom in social media and move to online playing they have “gone to the moon”.
