A Happy New Year to all of our Chinese and Asian clients and readers.
All Asian clients should check their emails where you will find a suitable red packet when you return to business mode.
The mythology of Chinese New Year seems particularly apt when compared with the modern day realities of the global football betting markets. The Nián was a man-eating monster from the mountains which appeared once per year to prey on human flesh - any similarities to the business practices of the European bookmakers must surely be purely coincidental. The people, realising that this monster was undermined by loud noises and the colour red, utilised fireworks and liberal use of all shades of scarlet to frighten the monster away. If only it were so easy to rid the world of Ladbrokes!
Chinese New Year sees the largest migration of beings on the planet as everybody puts family and friends ahead of business, money and power. Confucius would have approved. Despite the fact that this window of up to 40 days results in a loss of market control together with associated profits, it actually is a prime example (probably the first in business) of creating an enlightened work/life balance. As the European layers scramble around to pick up extra earnings in the Chinese New Year window, the Chinese layers are relaxing and reordering their prerogatives in order to return to the marketplace at the peak of their game towards the end of the month.
Strategy is everything to the Chinese and represents the main reason why they have dominated the global football markets since time immemorial. A creative version of centralised planning incorporating space for business development enables the betting sector in Asia to collectively and individually out-manoeuvre the clumsy European outfits, who depend on the base qualities of coercion, thuggery, corruption and a startling lack of a big picture overview. Where the Chinese are proactive and possess a cutting edge attitude to the correct types of risk, the Europeans are entirely reactive and simply do not do risk. The Asian layers invite all and sundry to participate in their markets to any degree of liquidity in the safe knowledge that they possess the ultimate trading models and hedging strategies. The Europeans close winning accounts after having previously restricted the amounts able to be bet. The Asians monitor the corruption endemic in the European system and model it to their own competitive advantage utilising cutting edge trading and modelling techniques together with highly developed evolutionary algorithms. The Europeans buy off the referees.
In the hopefully not-too-distant future when football is protected from the incredibly negative influences of the bookmakers via proper bottom-up regulation, the Asians will dominate the markets. Good. We, as analysts and traders, will then be treated to a meritocratic marketplace where participants are rewarded for their professionalism rather than for their corrupt practices.
Of course, not all Asian market participants rely on intelligence and meritocracy and it is no coincidence that the likes of Shinawatra have cosied up to other autocratic presences at the Premier League, the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) and selected private markets to establish entirely corrupt structures. But, as soon as these corrupted entities put their collective heads above the parapet, their lack of strategy is targeted and undermined by the slick Asian analysts utilising creative modelling and cloned trading. It is a constant source of amazement to our Trading Team that the Asian market makers understand the Europeans better than the Europeans understand themselves. The fact that they also understand football better than the European layers is equally astonishing - how many traders at Ladbrokes could compete against the Asians at, say, sumo wrestling markets?
And it is not just in sport that the Asians demonstrate an ability to plan strategically - a skill singularly absent in the short-termism of western shareholder capitalism. Who was there to replace the immediacy of the private equity firms when the liquidity crisis loomed? Asian sovereign-wealth funds, that's who. Such funds modelled the instability of the western economic system and built reserves so as to be able to ride to a profitable rescue when the west was facing systemic ruin. With the capitalism of the west increasingly dependent on the financial muscle, innovation and growth of the Asian markets and the fate of the dollar being in Asian hands, Goldman Sachs' projection of 2027 for when the Chinese economy exceeds the American one is certainly far too optimistic from a US perspective. A superb example of the strategic thinking in China is that motorways have already been built between cities that do not yet exist! Try and get a free market economy to plan that far ahead or, indeed, ahead at all. Or even to plan, for that matter! Another key point demonstrating the difference between the two cultures is that a Chinese military book, The Art Of War, is used as a manual in western military circles today. And it is thought of as being ahead of its time. It was written by Sun Tzu over 2,000 years ago!
All of our analysts use Tai Chi and/or Qigong as a support to the trading process. The Chinese, unaffected by the ludicrous restrictions imposed on western scientific knowledge by government and business, are able to explore entirely original work/life balances which create entirely new realities with the massive benefits consequently bestowed on the individuals. Mention universal energy in a western boardroom and you will be shown the door; a similar statement in China opens doors of consequence.
In the west, Lyotard says: "Effectively truth is trumped by the best possible input-output equation... The state and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narrative of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians and instruments are purchased not to find truth but to augment power". China too seeks power but through a mixture of cynical realism and post-modernism, China's emphasis is, again utilising the words of Lyotard: "...placed on the increase in being, the jubilation that results from the invention of new rules of the game".
We celebrate Chinese philosophy.
新年快樂.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
