The value of the world’s top betting brands is in freefall this week as the international economic order reels from the arbitrary imposition of President Trump’s tariffs.
The fiscal move–called “a beautiful thing” by Mr Trump and his acolytes but likened to a “Mafia shakedown” by a clutch of respected economists writing in financial papers-of-record, among them the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Economist–has thrown the world of gambling and the wider financial space into existential crisis.
Among the biggest iGaming losers to date are those companies such as entain, evoke and Better Collective who were already facing unsettling “issues”.
The value of entain shares, for example, already down by some 30 percent over the past 12-months because of a series of compliance and money laundering breaches, had fallen by a further 16 percent, by time of this reporting.
Fellow London-listed gaming omnichannel evoke, formerly 888 Holdings, has seen its stock decline by near a quarter in the last week; while Danish-origin iGaming affiliate Better Collective, listed on the Nasdaq Copenhagen has seen its value plunge by almost 16 percent.
Fiscal Earthquake
Around the world stock markets, and the gambling companies listed on them, were shaken by the trumpian tariffs earthquake, which saw the UK slapped with a relatively-modest 10 percent sanction, the European Union with 20 percent and China with first 35 percent, then additional 50 percent tariffs when it had the temerity to retaliate with its own tariffs against the United States.
Even super fit DraftKings and Flutter Entertainment, owners of FanDuel, were not immune to the shares drop — the biggest financial crisis to hit world moneymarkets since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and before that the 2008 property crash.
Flutter shares are down 14.9 percent in the last month on its primary New York Stock Exchange listing and down 11.03 percent over the same period on its secondary London listing.
Trumponomics
DraftKings, for its part, has taken a 6.74 percent hit.
Amid these volatile “Trumponomics” of burn and churn such stats may appear to be meaningless. Far more accurate is the simple pointer indicating: down, down, down.
Gambling industry data crunchers Regulus Partners, experts on sports and leisure verticals, warn, as if it were needed, that “the new U.S. tariffs could have a profound impact on global gaming markets”.
And most financial advisers predict a coming economic recession unless the Trump tariffs are hastily dropped or revised soonest.
Yet for gambling’s iGaming sector there is a narrow silver lining within the fiscal dark clouds: online betting is likely to get a bigger share of any diminishing gambling pie as punters with less disposable income amid the coming economic crisis accelerate their shift from traditional bricks and mortar wagering to digital.
Bravado
“There is a distinct whiff of Don Corleone in Donald Trump’s approach to trade and diplomacy,” Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times wrote this week.
“Like a movie mob boss, Trump knows how to switch between menace and magnanimity.
“But the tariff war that [he] has unleashed is revealing the weakness of the mafia boss approach to the world economy.
“Faced with plummeting global markets, Trump is putting on a show of bravado. But he is clearly completely out of his depth. In the movies, we know how this ends. We are about to discover what happens in real life.”
Meantime, our world of gambling, like the world at large, watches with astonishment and bated breath as President Donald J. Trump, the Gambler-in-Chief, continues to roll the dice in the biggest high-stakes game of all.
