An Irishman's Diary

In a sobering coincidence, Allied Irish Banks and the bookmaking firm Paddy Power both announced their 2006 results this week. AIB's profits were up a whopping 60 per cent, while the bookies' profits whopped too, with a 51 per cent rise. It may be useful to reflect on this coincidence if you tune in to the Cheltenham Racing Festival next week and hear any of the horses described as a "banker".

As it happens, I have been attending a series of financial advice seminars lately, known as "Cheltenham Preview Nights". These are held in pubs and hotels around the country during the run-up to the festival, and they bring together panels of investment experts with members of the public who need guidance. Many of those attending will have had SSIAs maturing around now. And of course there are literally hundreds of products available to them at Cheltenham next week, should they want to reinvest.

The job of the preview night experts - typically jockeys, trainers, bookmakers, and newspaper tipsters - was to help them through the maze of conflicting information in the market. It was a bit like that ad for the financial regulator (the one with the worried-looking people confessing their confusion on a bus), except that you wouldn't stand up at a Cheltenham preview and admit not knowing what a "handicap hurdle" was. Fluency in horse language is assumed.

Based on all the advice I heard, the biggest certainty of the meeting is that Kauto Star will win the Gold Cup. Terms and conditions apply, however, and the value of your investment may fall as well as rise. Specifically it may fall, and if it does fall, it will be late in the race, just when you think you've won.

Kauto Star has an unfortunate habit of going through the last fence rather than over it, which is the more traditional route. But the fence-jumping experts - hedge-fund analysts, you could call them - think this is because his attention wanders when he's in front. Accordingly, it is expected that jockey Ruby Walsh will not let him lead until he's over the last, whereupon the horse will part company from the rest of the field like a scalded cat.

He is, in short, "a banker". The bad news is that his price is already so low you might get a better return from an actual deposit account. And by the way, if he doesn't win, don't blame me. I'm only saying what I heard at the seminars.

It might also be worth mentioning here the colourful convention by which many racing tipsters operate under aliases. I suspect this is on security advice. At any rate, their pseudonyms vary from the poetic, such as "Pegasus" in the News of the World, to the prosaic, like "The Ferret" in the Dundee Courier.

Some names appear designed to discourage complaints. I see that this newspaper employs the services of a certain "Captain John". And although I don't know who this is in real life, the implication that he is armed would dissuade me from contacting him in person if his tips were wrong.

One of the investment experts at the preview nights had both a name and a pseudonym. Mark "The Couch" Winstanley is so titled after the item of furniture on which he spends much of his life, watching races and placing bets by phone. He is that rare creature, the professional punter, and he combines a sharp Cockney wit with a wide range of forthright views about horses.

Among the many opinions he was strongly of is that Detroit City will not be beaten in the Champion Hurdle. And that, in particular, he will not be beaten by the Irish twice-winner of the race, Hardy Eustace. "If 'ardy Eustace finishes in front of him, I'll go back to work," he quipped, with the confidence of a man who has not worked for some time.

The Couch is living the dream. But there is a price to be paid for everything, and in this case it is the vast amounts of research he needs to do to stay ahead of the bookies. His considerable physique testifies to a man who doesn't get out nearly as much as he should.

The shock betting news ahead of Cheltenham is that blind faith in Irish-trained horses may be a good strategy. Patriotism is usually portrayed as a character weakness among punters, especially those who travel over to the festival and may have drink on them when betting. But in an analysis of the past 10 years, the Racing Post found that, when you took into account the much larger number of British entries, Irish horses were almost twice as likely to win.

The trend, which also extends to top-four placings, is more pronounced in certain races, notably in the Gold Cup. An each-way bet on all 31 Irish horses that competed in the past 10 runnings of the race would apparently have left you with a bigger percentage profit than AIB and Paddy Power combined.

On the other hand, if you haven't started already, this might be a bad year to take up patriotism. None of the three Irish horses now left in the Gold Cup is strongly fancied. And the least fancied is one called Forget the Past, which sounds like good advice.