Football Index Placed in to Administration

[Dave]

That escalated quickly.

[Batard]

Glad I didn't invest in that bandwagon

[Mpache]

1 minute ago, Batard said:

Glad I didn't invest in that bandwagon

I was also tempted at one point. Looked like a good concept. Shame it didn't work out.

[Whiskey]

Said in the other thread that I thought this was fishy from the start, so never invested. 

Just feel for people that did invest and as a result have lost tons.

[Batard]

Just now, Mpache said:

I was also tempted at one point. Looked like a good concept. Shame it didn't work out.

On closer inspection it appears it was quite a sophisticated pyramid scheme

[Dave]

34 minutes ago, Mpache said:

I was also tempted at one point. Looked like a good concept. Shame it didn't work out.

Before the World Cup people built up the Peru players so they could sell them on a profit before a ball got kicked. So if you timed your exit right you could have made a fortune.

[Dan+]

Guilty as charged. I've ended up losing a bit from it, after initially making some money. It's gotten gradually worse in the past year and the earlier you got out during the past year - the better, as it's just gotten worse and worse. I sold whatever I could a couple of months ago, so ended up taking a loss, but there's still a fair bit 'trapped' in there, that I may get if this legal case against them gets anywhere, but I'd consider that a bonus if I got that at this point.

I still think there's a lot of scope for something like this to be a success, but they completely blew this in the end.

FI = Fucked It.

[Smiley Culture]

It was fun while it lasted. I’m one of the lucky ones, I got in and out a while ago and made a pretty small profit but I never really deposited much because the signs were always there and there was little protection in case of such occurrences like this. 

[Stan]

@...Dan invested quite a bit in this I think. Hopefully he's not been hit too hard

[Dave]

Seems like they placed themselves in to administration after their licence was suspended. Even in their last comms they couldn't be honest.

[Honey Honey]

Am I right in thinking it was a ponzi scheme rather than a stock market? That their marketing success was in part fraudulently making some people rich without a counter bet to get more customers thinking they could get rich to? Rich relatively speaking.

[Batard]

31 minutes ago, Steve Bruce Almighty said:

Am I right in thinking it was a ponzi scheme rather than a stock market? That their marketing success was in part fraudulently making some people rich without a counter bet to get more customers thinking they could get rich to? Rich relatively speaking.

It's without doubt in my view a Ponzi scheme. I actually watched a documentary on Charles Ponzi's pyramid schemes and I for the life of me can't believe it's still something that is able to happen today. 

[Dave]

2 hours ago, Steve Bruce Almighty said:

Am I right in thinking it was a ponzi scheme rather than a stock market? That their marketing success was in part fraudulently making some people rich without a counter bet to get more customers thinking they could get rich to? Rich relatively speaking.

They used to have an instant sell function. So say you bought a share of Jadon Sancho at £5, there would be an Instant Sell of say £4.70. It resembled a pyramid scheme but people still lost money as you were betting on trader psychology as opposed to what happened in a match a lot of the time. So people like @...Dan who have a great knowledge of French football would have out performed any early backers.

During Covid they changed that Instant Sell to say £1.20 and then removed the Instant Sell function. They bragged about how healthy the company was financially during that period.

They replaced it with an order book system so the players would set the Instant Sell prices. They however completely underestimated how much liquidity there was in the product and downward pressure started. Its all been downhill since then.

My opinion of it was that it wasn't intended to a ponzi scheme but when they realised they were in trouble due to severe incompetence they did everything to syphon more money out of their customers.

I think there's more to this story. Two weeks ago, some of their engineers from 'Index Labs' were discussing Project Hydrone which they think will be a game changer in the tech world. They were advertising jobs in the region of £90000 - £110000 two weeks ago. It's Bet Index that are in administration and not Index Labs. So you can assume where some of the money has been syphoned too.

[...Dan]

4 hours ago, Stan said:

@...Dan invested quite a bit in this I think. Hopefully he's not been hit too hard

£7,000. I could've withdrawn £12,000 a few months ago, now I guess I'll end up with nothing.

[Smiley Culture]

QPR have ended their sponsorship with them, effective immediately. 

[Inverted]

Pretty scary stuff.

I was never really aware of what is what specifically, but it sounded like an interesting concept. And you see it plastered all over the place, so you assumed it was pretty well-established. And then when you strip away the marketing, it's basically a bunch of guys in a room, fiddling people's "portfolios" up and down, and hoping that people are going to keep coming in and buying-up more stock.

Worst and most cynically of all, it preyed on the growing awareness around gambling being bad, by marketing itself as not really being gambling.

[Smiley Culture]

1 hour ago, Inverted said:

Pretty scary stuff.

I was never really aware of what is what specifically, but it sounded like an interesting concept. And you see it plastered all over the place, so you assumed it was pretty well-established. And then when you strip away the marketing, it's basically a bunch of guys in a room, fiddling people's "portfolios" up and down, and hoping that people are going to keep coming in and buying-up more stock.

Worst and most cynically of all, it preyed on the growing awareness around gambling being bad, by marketing itself as not really being gambling.

To which they were punished, I believe, for advertising as a stock market and not a gambling platform. 

 

[Inverted]

In hindsight, the biggest red flag was the fact that they simultaneously played the role of broker, and also created and paid the dividends on all of the “shares”.

Which is a blatant conflict of interest which ultimately makes the whole thing fundamentally nothing like stock investing. 

Stock investing can be like betting on thin air sometimes, but it’s still not that bad. Brokers do their thing, and companies do their thing, with all of them having their own aims and methods and stakes. You can get screwed, but it’s hard for any one actor to be the cause of it. 

When it’s just one group of people controlling all of the aspects of the “market”, you’re asking for trouble. But as I said, that's in hindsight - I think it must have seemed reasonable to assume that the regulators would stop them from doing any of egregiously unfair stuff they've recently done, but it now seems that the Gambling Commission had no idea how to handle them. 

 

[Batard]

3 hours ago, ...Dan said:

£7,000. I could've withdrawn £12,000 a few months ago, now I guess I'll end up with nothing.

Holy shit dude :-(

[Dave]

42 minutes ago, Inverted said:

In hindsight, the biggest red flag was the fact that they simultaneously played the role of broker, and also created and paid the dividends on all of the “shares”.

Which is a blatant conflict of interest which ultimately makes the whole thing fundamentally nothing like stock investing. 

Stock investing can be like betting on thin air sometimes, but it’s still not that bad. Brokers do their thing, and companies do their thing, with all of them having their own aims and methods and stakes. You can get screwed, but it’s hard for any one actor to be the cause of it. 

When it’s just one group of people controlling all of the aspects of the “market”, you’re asking for trouble. But as I said, that's in hindsight - I think it must have seemed reasonable to assume that the regulators would stop them from doing any of egregiously unfair stuff they've recently done, but it now seems that the Gambling Commission had no idea how to handle them. 

 

Matt Slater said something similar on his podcast this week. 

Whats not been touched on in the media is how much they we're making through commission prior to taking away the Instant Sell feature. The amount of commission they were making on in game trading was insane. They wanted to treat people as investors but a lot of people had betting mind sets. If a player scored in an early kick off you'd see people buying shares in them through the ticker like there was no tomorrow in the hope you could flip it to someone else for a small profit. They also had seeders and what not but you have to assume now the other sources of income were exaggerated.

Adam Cole was talking about Football Index becoming an Alternative Asset Class just last summer. The whole thing, up until last week, seemed legitimate and there was no suggestion they'd ever be in financial trouble with the noise that was coming out of the company. There was talk of £80,000,000 reserves last summer so there has to be huge questions over where that has gone.

[Dave]

Keiran Maguire had a phone call on Wednesday telling him that Football Index were going to be placed in to administration in 24 hours.

The fact they waited until after all the midweek European games to do this so they could squeeze every last penny out of people tells you everything you need to know about their integrity.

[...Dan]

Good thread explaining why FI should've been successful and asking where all the money has gone.