A shadowy figure lumbered into Ladbrokes this morning. His chin was tucked into his chest, and he wore a hat, pulled down to conceal his face.
He looked nervously over his shoulder, hoping no-one had spotted him, had recognised him. He approached the counter.
"I’d like to cash this bet," he told the cashier, passing her the slip. She almost fainted when she saw it. This shadowy punter had bet billions of pounds that Labour would lose the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Even at short odds the winnings were enormous.
"You could pay off half the national debt with that!" she said, as she handed the man his winnings in a very, very big brown paper bag. And then it hit her. She realised who the man before her was.
It was Gordon Brown. Of course, it all made sense! He knew Labour didn’t have a hope of winning that by-election. The economy’s too screwed up for that.
So Brown had bet against his own party, using Treasury funds. That’s the only way he could make the public sums work.
And it worked! Labour lost heavily. Voters elected Conservative Edward Timpson though for alliteration’s sake I’d like us to all start calling him Ted). A constituency that had been a safe Labour stronghold had seen a 17% swing to the Tories.
Gordon was delighted!
At least, that’s how I’m making sense of Labour’s terrible, terrible strategy in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Labour was always going to be up against it. SO, in desperation, they resorted to name-calling.
They handed out flyers mocking Ted’s supposed upper-class credentials. The flyers had a picture of a top hat on them...
This sort of tactic is childish, small-minded and is completely irrelevant to anything voters actually care about. As William Rees-Mogg writes in tomorrow’s Fleet Street Letter:
"When prices are up in the supermarkets and at the petrol pump, it is no good Labour attacking the Conservative candidate, who is a family lawyer by profession, because he spent some years getting a good education at Uppingham. Anti-toff propaganda is irrelevant to the problems of the credit crunch. It belongs, if anywhere, to the politics of the 1940s, not to the present day."
For his part, the Tedster was full of talk about ‘change’. Voters had "rejected the old politics", he said.
"Gordon just doesn’t get it and the Government needs to change," continued ‘new politics’ Ted.
This is all the Tories need to do now. Keep saying the word ‘Change’, Barack Obama-style, and they’ll be home and dry.
And then we’ll see change... at least for those MPs who get to move to a different office and have a more important job.
I guess what I’m saying is this: let’s not get carried away.
Ted may carry the lustre of being Britain’s newest MP, but he’s still just a politician. They’re all politicians. Don’t expect too much of them.
Is oil in a bubble?
"Looking at the long term, we suspect that oil will be expensive for a long time," writes Bill Bonner in today’s Daily Reckoning. "But in their enthusiasm, markets tend to overdo it. Our guess is that they’re overdoing it in the oil market now...or close to it."
Oil has fallen back a little in the last couple of days. My angry colleague, Frank Hemsley, told me this morning that there is less open interest — the total number of futures contracts that are yet to be closed — on the oil market, a point also made by our commodities hero Garry White:
"A lot of people were shorting oil, hoping the price would fall. But it went up. So, to cut losses, they closed their positions by buying oil futures, sending the price up to $135. It’s the classic short squeeze!"
Garry concurs that the recent spike in oil had a speculative tailwind. But he’s not worried by the slight pull back. Because oil would need to fall a long, long way to impact on the oil companies he’s invested in.
Also wading into the oil debate is Time Trader, Robin Tracey. As he wrote to his subscribers yesterday:
"Higher oil prices are here to stay. This does not mean that in the short term there cannot be profit taking, and a pull back of $15 or so. But unless there is a significant reduction in demand, do not expect any relief in the longer term.
"What this means for us is that equity markets will struggle to make any headway. It also means that inflation will become the bête noir again and we will start hearing about interest rate rises."
But for Robin, it’s actually a good thing equity markets are held back. He doesn’t want a boom in stocks — he wants a stable market that helps him, and his subscribers, make money.
Robin’s confident that that’s exactly what we’ll get. As the man himself wrote yesterday:
"Bottom line: the outlook for Time Trader is great!"
Some more nice profit for Manraaj’s copper play
"Since we wrote our last update on the company, the shares have risen by a further 16%. We are already up by 122% on this investment and the news just keeps on getting better."
So writes Manraaj Singh in today’s free edition of Profit Hunter. Manraaj is writing about his copper play, which, as those numbers demonstrate, has proved to be a nice little earner — on paper, at least, as the position is still open — for his subscribers.
"We were in this copper play before anyone was talking about," he says. "Now it’s getting a lot of press attention — hence we’re seeing these rather lovely moves."
Now, here’s the thing. Just because Profit Hunter has made big gains on that stock (and others) is not a guarantee it will happen again. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
But Manraaj is confident that this isn’t the end of the road for his copper investment.
"We could be looking at a 2,514% gain," he told me this morning.
"You must be joking!" I said. But the Manraaj stare told me that he was most definitely not.
And then he showed me the facts. Granted, it looks like a bit of a speculative play. But if you’re an adventurous type, the potential rewards are very much worth it.
Find out why Manraaj reckons his copper play could make you up to 25 times your money!
Until tomorrow
Ben Traynor
