Spread Betting
IG Index was set up by Stuart Wheeler, a man fascinated by probability. “Every morning before I weigh myself, I will try to work out the odds of me being lighter or heavier than the day before. There’s no point in it, but I find myself doing it automatically.”
The company was set up using £30,000 invested by six of his friends. Shares were originally worth £100 each – when the company floated in 2000, they had increased to £12m!
Bridge, poker, backgammon and blackjack were obsessions that took him from the Clermont Club in Mayfair to Las Vegas.
Wheeler was adopted at birth, and was later delighted to discover that his natural mother was a competition bridge player – now what was the probability of that?