Chris Porter

That was me today (see image). Minus the tan. Because today is the day I left the paper bets behind and put my money where my mouth is by staking over £300 on three ‘fixed odd bets’. These bets say that the FTSE, Dow and S&P500 stock market indexes will not drop, to a particular number, within 7 days.

So.. let me fill you in…

It all started with a friend meeting a guy in a train station in Copenhagen.

This guy he had been building up his “pension fund” by placing bets on the stock market following a specific and easy to follow strategy (Yours for only 3 EASY payments of $999! BUT WAIT … THERE’S MORE! Order now and get this free electronic egg whisk and dog cardigan!) .

This strategy aims is to win small pots of profit by placing reasonably safe bets on a website called BetOnMarkets.com – a site where you can put money on the stock market moving one way or another.

After their chat my friend was rather convinced of it’s potential and went in search of the learning more.

Come Christmas day he’d bought the learning materials for his son, my friend, Karl. At first glance I rolled my eyes and made some snide remark about him being scammed. The second thing out my mouth was to ask to borrow it. The optimist is usually preceded by the skeptic.

A couple of days later and I had a rough idea how to work the system.

It was time to start placing paper bets (practice bets with fake money to test the concept). Karl will tell you, my ‘convincer strategy’ (e.g. my internal method of being convinced) is typically longggggg … I need to see proof, examples, theory behind it and then test it for a few weeks before I’m willing to put any trust in it. And by trust. I mean money.

Two weeks later and the results were in:

A profit of £104.80
And this was 10 minutes per day.

So armed with my our new knowledge (we’d placed more paper bets) it was time to cash in and place real bets.

So with £1020 in my pot I wagered £309.46. And now the waiting begins.

My calculations show that a weekly 10% return is near guaranteed (each bet is a 20% return but factor in losses to get 10%) if you control the two main gambling demons – risk and greed. That’s a 10% compounded weekly return. So if you have a pot of £100 to bet the first week, you have a pot of £110 the next week, then £121 the week after.

Over 52 weeks, that transforms an initial £1000 into £142,042.93 – it can be pretty hard to believe the magic of compound interest is that powerful. But it is.

So I’ll be getting some new business cards printed up now.

Chris Porter
Professional Gambler.

I’ll keep you updated…

Today Google announced their fiber optic network that will give between 50’000 and 500’000 in America access to download speeds of 1 GIGABIT PER FREAKING SECOND!

To give you some idea, that is over 1000 times faster than the typical UK broadband speed.

UPDATE: You DO NOT have to pay an additional ‘seat charge’ to fly with flybe. By default, they select a seat for you and tack the charge on to your bill. You can deselect the seat and “continue” to the next page to remove the charge. Regardless, you’ll get a seat. It’s always a first come first served policy… just got to race everyone to the extra leg toom seats!

UPDATE 2: It seems other low cost airlines have started doing this too. Ryanair, Jet2, bmibaby and air berlin have all been reported to be taking part in the charge for a seat scam.

UPDATE 3: The problem is not in charging for a seat. Premium seats being sold for a premium, is fair business in my eyes. The problem is the lack of transparency. Don’t select a seat as default and make it difficult to un-select that option.

Low cost airliners are pretty well known for advertising a ridiculously low price then hitting you with the extra charges to ramp the price up.

Today I booked two tickets with FlyBe. While going through the checkout procedure I select my seats and choose the emergency door row so we’ve got some extra leg room.

I go to pay, hit submit, and in my horror realise I’m being charged a £30 seat charge. That’s a charge for sitting, and trust me, there is no standing option – I looked.

Luckily my password was incorrect and it spat back my order giving me the chance to go change the seats from “emergency” which cost £15 to standard.

Back to checkout … and I see a £12 seat charge.

At this point I’m a bit cofused.

Not only am I paying a fee to fly, a fee in taxes, a transaction fee and a fee to have luggage but also a fee to sit during the flight.

So I go back and de-select my seat options and continue. It turns out preselecting a seat guarantees you a place and you are charged for the service. Fair enough, it’s just not made clear.

So dodging this £30 bullet I continue and pay the fees to get us where we’re going.

With a £3 credit card fee on top. Another fee, this time a fee to pay the fees. ffs.