Publicly Traded Betting Sites: What a Stock Listing Tells You

Image credit: Tjeerd Wiersma

The early days of online gambling were like the Wild West in some respects. Legislation and regulation were nonexistent and pretty much anyone with the technical know-how could set up a gambling site and take wagers from people around the world. Some of these sites were run by reputable businessmen while others were most likely run by the mafia.

Those days are mostly behind us and the industry is increasingly dominated by legitimate corporations complete with boards of directors, publicly-available financial statements and a willingness to pay their taxes. Scale brings its own problems, and a large company is not automatically a well-behaved one.

A listed company does give you things a private one does not: published accounts, a board, a named regulator in each market it operates in, and a complaints route that does not end with the operator. Those are real and they are checkable. They are not a guarantee of anything — listed operators are fined by regulators regularly, and being listed says nothing about whether a particular brand will treat you well. It is one signal among several, and the useful part is that it is a signal you can verify yourself.

This page does not give investment advice. Whether shares in a gambling company are a good investment is not a question we are licensed to answer.

Who Actually Owns the Brand You Are Betting With

The ownership of this industry is concentrated: a handful of groups own most of the brands a European customer would recognise, several of those groups were assembled from former competitors, and the names change with each acquisition — which is why this page describes how to find out who owns a brand rather than listing who owns what.

How to Check It Yourself, for Any Brand

The check takes a couple of minutes and does not go out of date:

• Read the footer of the betting site. In Great Britain a licensed operator has to name the licensee and its licence number in the footer, and most regulated markets require something equivalent. That name — not the brand — is the company you are dealing with.

• Look that entity up in the regulator's own register. The register tells you what it is licensed for, in which market, and whether it currently holds that licence. A brand is not licensed; a company is.

• Search the entity name for an investor-relations page. If one exists, the group is listed somewhere, and its annual report will tell you which brands it owns. If none exists, it is privately held — which is not a mark against it, only a different amount of public information.

That sequence answers the question this page was written to answer, for any brand, in any year.