Anti-liberal said:
That's right, and the same goes for Olympic and Pinnacle. If Enron can go down, any offshore sportsbook certainly can.
Apples and oranges....Enron was using decptive accounting practices to keep losses off the books in order to keep their stock valuation high. They got caught up in the desire to beat Wall Street analysts estimates every quarter, even if they had to make up the numbers while they went along to do it.
Since they're not a publicly traded company, and only in the business of making book, Pinny and Olympic have no incentive to do that. Besides, I'd trust the management of Olympic, Pinny and countless other offshore books more than I'd trust the late Ken Lay and the not so late Andrew Fastow...
And back to the Enron example, while a lot of employees and smaller investors got screwed, if you had been paying attention to what was going on the collapse of the company was not a huge surprise. There were numerous allegations about bribery and other shady dealings at Enron all throughout the 1990's. Even in 2001--when the company imploded--had you been paying attention to the business media (and if you own stock you have no business *not* paying attention to it) you'd have had nearly a year to read the writing on the wall. If you were tipped off by the fact that most of the Enron upper management was unloading stock in the Summer of 2000 right after it hit an all time high you would have been out well over a year before the sky fell.
Of course to read the "writing on the wall" you have to be aware of what information is relative and accurate and what information is just idle innuendo. Based on the information at hand, where there's not been one shred of legitimate evidence or even something that would suggest that either Pinny or The Greek is a) in financial trouble b) going to kick out US clients or c) some combination thereof I consider it an insult to compare these fine bookmakers to Enron.
I guess if your point is that "anything can happen" I'll agree. OJ (allegedly) lopped of the head of his ex-wife and another guy and walked. The Soviet Empire fell without much of a fight. But just because anything *can* happen doesn't mean that anything *will* happen. As an investor--and if you have a decent size position offshore you need to think of yourself as one whether you like it or not--you need to react based on what is likely to happen and not on what *could* happen in either the best or worst case scenario.