Merlins Magic Mirror

How to play Merlins Magic Mirror

This clash between two teams who were embroiled in one of the most controversial games in football will be very interesting now that it’s in the Premier League.

If you’ve forgotten, Leeds and Villa played out a sensational match a couple of years ago in the Championship as Leeds scored by illegitimate means then were supposed to be letting Aston Villa score in response until Pontus Janssen didn’t read the memo.

Both sides are in decent form in general in the Premier League having returned in consecutive years. Aston Villa stayed up by the skin of their teeth in the 2019/20 season, but have kicked on under Dean Smith and in Grealish, Watkins and Traore, have some of the most dangerous attacking players in the Premier League.

How to play Merlins Magic Mirror

“Why not use the dataset I already have on gambling sites to map the most problematic ones, identify how they are connected and build a deeper picture of the networks behind them?” That thought process eventually gave birth to Trace2Trace.

Trace2Trace is relatively new, but Madsen says its underlying dataset has already grown to around 620,000. And it continues to grow, highlighting the scale of illegal operations in the gambling industry.

“We receive around 7,000 domains a day on average through the lists we monitor, including new and cloned sites,” he explains.

About Merlins Magic Mirror

Entain’s removal from the FTSE 100 is a telling sign of what has happened to gambling stocks across both Europe and the US in recent years. The company’s shares have fallen sharply over the past year, even as its first-half results showed continued growth in several important markets.

In the six months to June, Entain’s online net gaming revenue rose 7% in constant currency. Revenue in Britain and Ireland increased 13%, while the company maintained its full-year guidance for online net gaming revenue growth of 5% to 7%. So why is its stock price still so under pressure?

One answer is that the industry is no longer being valued primarily on the promise of endless growth. The market instead wants to see profit, cash generation and manageable regulation maintained across all facets of a listed business. Ed Birkin, managing director of H2 Gambling Capital, says the longer-term decline in gambling stocks runs much deeper than just changes to earnings forecasts.