Betting on politics: a bad bet on the Italian prime minister
That Giuseppe Conti is almost certain to be the next prime minister of Italy is not too surprising after all, says Matthew Partridge.
At the weekend, Janet Daby was selected as the prospective Labour candidate for Lewisham East. This means that last week's tip to bet on her (along with Sakina Sheikh) paid off. Unfortunately, it looks as though the new Italian prime minister is almost certain to be Giuseppe Conte (pictured), which means our suggestion that you bet on both Paolo Gentiloni and Antonio Tajani will not end so well, although this isn't too surprising given the results of the Italian elections in March.
This week also marks the second anniversary of this column and we've had an eventful two years. We had some notable winners predicting that the EU referendum result would be close, that Cameron would leave before 2019, and that Theresa May would call an early election.
We also correctly predicted the results of elections in Australia, Austria, Germany, New Zealand and Virginia. But we also made some mistakes, miscalling the overall results of the US presidential election and the last UK general election.
Overall, we've made 90 combined tips involving 151 individual bets. One of them ended up being cancelled (the Manchester Gordon by-election) but 65 of the combined bets (and 105 of the individual tips) were settled. If you had followed our advice and properly weighted each part of the combined bets in line with the odds, you would have made a return of 47%. Even if you had just bet an equal amount on each sub-bet you would have made a profit of 15.4%. So far, so good.