Bookmakers usually celebrate when a heavily backed favourite gets beaten on the line – but not this time. If the Sunday Times’s confident report that the culture secretary, Matt Hancock, will cut maximum stakes on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) from £100 to £2 proves correct, the bookies will take a drubbing.

The City had expected the dead hand of the Treasury to intervene and insist on £20, so big falls in bookmakers’ share prices followed on Monday – William Hill down 12% and Ladbrokes Coral off 8%. Cue, also, one last round of lobbying from the bookies. “A cut to stakes will have serious consequences, resulting in shop closures which will ultimately affect jobs, tax revenue and the funding of racing,” said Jim Mullen, chief executive of Ladbrokes.

Nice try, but none of those pleas is persuasive when set against the evidence on the other side of the ledger that bookmakers have been shockingly poor at policing problem gambling and FOBT addiction.

Even as FOBTs, essentially souped-up electronic roulette wheels, have rightly been condemned as a social blight, the stories have kept coming: from Paddy Power encouraging a problem gambler to keep betting until he lost his home, jobs and access to his children, to wider complaints about grubby marketing tactics.

Against a backdrop of heightened public concern about addiction, Mullen and co have offered only thin arguments. Yes, the Treasury would lose a few quid if stakes were cut to £2, but the public purse could gain in the form of a lower bill from clearing up social damage. And while job losses and shop closures may be inevitable if bookies can’t make up the lost ground, other businesses would appear; some would benefit if the £1.8bn lost by punters on the machines last year were recycled into local economies.

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Bookmakers weigh up judicial review against FOBT curbs Read more

As for horse racing, it’s time for the sport’s authorities to examine their business model. Fewer bookmaking shops would mean lower income from race-transmission fees but, come on, you can’t expect to be subsidised, in effect, by revenues from FOBTs.

The bookies can still hope that Hancock will change his mind, or be bullied into doing so by a judicial review. But the point remains: the industry would not be in its current mess if it had spent less time issuing dramatic warnings and more time cleaning up its act.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ocado can pitch its kit as a sort of anti-Amazon protective shield and offer regional exclusivity to those prepared to pay. Photograph: Ocado

Suddenly, little ol’ Ocado is a player

You wait half a decade for Ocado to secure a tie-up with a foreign supermarket chain, and then three deals come along at once – or at least in quick succession.

The first, last June, created little excitement because Ocado wasn’t allowed to name its partner, other than it say it was a regional European operator that merely wanted to licence the proprietary software. But last November’s deal with Groupe Casino in France definitely caught the eye. Casino is a big operator and it bought Ocado’s full package, complete with robots to pick the groceries.

Now comes a Casino-style deal with Sobeys, Canada’s second-biggest retailer with 1,500 stores. Suddenly little ol’ Ocado, battered by sceptics, is a player. The shares shot up 27% – in part because the many hedge funds shorting the stock were desperate to close their losing bets. Ocado is now worth £3.4bn, or about 60% of Sainsbury’s stock market value.

Estimating the long-term value of these partnerships to Ocado remains guesswork because commercial details are (understandably) being kept under wraps. But it is possible that the rush of deals is not a coincidence. Amazon’s $13.7bn purchase last year of Whole Foods Market may have caused panic in the boardrooms of foreign supermarket chains without a decent online strategy. If so, Ocado can now pitch its kit as a sort of anti-Amazon protective shield and offer regional exclusivity to those prepared to pay.

The share price still looks overinflated given the intensity of retail competition on the home front and the need to make the international deals work, as opposed to merely sign them. But Ocado deserves credit. A year ago the company was being asked if the overseas deals would ever arrive; now the question is how many it can handle safely.

Unhealthy appetite for indices

You may never have heard of the Index Industry Association, but it has some remarkable news: there are 3.28m indices in world, of which about 95% cover stock markets. Put another way, there are 70 times more indices being compiled and published than there are quoted companies in the world.

One assumes every sliced-and-diced index must be useful to someone somewhere, but the investment world’s appetite for creating so many benchmarks to measure performance seems basically unhealthy. Do fund managers spend as much time analysing companies’ accounts as they do fretting about their own relative performance versus an index? One suspects not.

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