Stuart lands the odds
I MET Stuart Wheeler at Oxford, where he was applying his disciplined mind to the odds at bridge and poker. He went on to take bets on gold. In the repressive climate of a quarter of a century ago, British citi- zens were not allowed to buy gold bullion on pain of being sent to prison. It occurred to Stuart that we could still take a stake in gold by backing the price to go up or, if we felt that way, down. So he started Investors Gold Index and quoted a price of his own, or rather two of them, a buying price and a selling price. This kind of investment turned out to have tax advantages, too. IG Index became a fmancial bookmaker, and the market leader in betting, not only on gold, but on shares, indices, commodities and metals of all sorts, interest rates and exchange rates. It takes bets, too, on sport- ing events, in which it includes the results of elections. Now IG Index is coming to market, and may be worth £100 million, and Stuart Wheeler holds a third of it: a winning hand, in fact. It may be that our youth was not as misspent as all that.
Previous page
