Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2014 32 Insights B rendan Poots is the founder and CEO of Priomha Capital, the world’s first fund manager centered on sports and events. The Australian, a keen sportsman himself, has overseen booming returns far in excess of more traditional funds. He spoke with Inside Asian Gaming about the genesis of Priomha, his methods and the future of the market. IAG : It seems the media has been payingmore attention recently to sports betting, both in a positive and negative manner. Is the extra attention affecting Priomha? Mr Poots: There are two sides to it. Unfortunately, sports betting still struggles with a stigma—it’s dirty, underground, old men with crusty beards smoking cigarettes trying to win $5, but it’s very different to that now. We’re always trying to defend the new side. With advancements in technology and global broadcast rights of sport it is a very different landscape than even 10 years ago. The fact that there’s more happening is raising it in people’s consciousness, which is a positive. Even so, if in the financial markets someone like Madoff has a Ponzi scheme, people brush it off as a one-off and the world still turns, but in sports betting people think that all the time and the industry is disproportionately tainted. Have you found that investors take a gambling fund seriously? Yes, investors do. We started informally about six years ago with me funding it while I was working. The original investors were interested because of their interest in sports. As part of our transparency, investors can see the bets made on a team or player beforehand, except for any opportunistic in-match betting, for which they get updates—for example, we were giving people updates every day in the first cricket Test between Australia and South Africa. The original investors liked the idea of having their money invested professionally while still being able to “cheer” on a result. Over the last two years, sentiment has gone from looking for a good bet to looking for a solid return that is uncorrelated to all other global markets. We’re now being seen as a viable alternative to flagging stock portfolios, property, etc. We’re increasingly being seen as a more mainstream alternative investment class, taking bigger investments and being looked at more seriously. I thought originally it’d be just people in our network, now people we’ve never met are investing hundreds of thousands. What led you to launch Priomha? I studied chemical engineering, so I had a maths and quantitative Sporting Chance Sports betting is becoming a mainstream investment opportunity, and one Australian company is at the forefront “We’re now being seen as a viable alternative to flagging stock portfolios, property, etc. We’re increasingly being seen as a more mainstream alternative investment class, taking bigger investments and being looked at more seriously.” background, then after uni I played cricket in England for four years. And I always liked a bet. In county cricket the overseas pro player is always funded by a wealthy person connected to the club. The guy who funded me was a bookie. I worked sometimes in the bookie shop and started seeing the amounts of money laid out on sport. Fast forward to 2007 and I studied at Columbia University in New York—we were taught about trading securities, oil, gas, etc. I got bored of that, mainly because of the underlying asset, but thought that I could use the same principles trading in sport, so toward the end of 2007 I started by trading $20,000 of my own money in sport. In 2009 I was made redundant post-GFC and decided that rather than dusting off my CV and looking for a job in a bad economic climate I’d trade sport full time.