Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name is Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Edger of The Spectator.

And today we're going to be talking about betting on the presidential election.

I'm joined by Matthew Shaddick, who's head of political odds at Lab Brooks, and Kathleen Brooks,

who's a research director at City Index, a spread betting company.

Matthew, I think I'll come to you first.

First, how much interest has there been in this US presidential election compared to, say, a British general election?

Pretty big, yeah. I mean, I think this is going to be probably bigger than the general election last year in terms of amounts of money we take.

Partly it's because Donald Trump's in the race, right? I mean, if we'd had a normal Republican candidate, I don't know, Rubio or someone,

I think there would have been a lot less interest, but this could be bigger than the general action,

could be bigger than the referendum of this year, which was the biggest political betting event

we'd ever traded. And what's your position? Are you dreading a Trump win? I mean,

will that mean you have to pay out huge amounts? Yeah, we're cheering on Hillary, big time. We were 150 to 1 on Trump

back in June last year when he declared. Quite a few people took advantage of that. And I also think

that I can tell that a huge amount of money is waiting to be bet on him in the last few weeks,

because knowing our customer base like I do, from experience of previous presidential elections

and to some extent the Brexit referendum, I'm anticipating that we're going to be left with a big

liability on Trump. Yeah. Do you know the biggest single bet you had at 150 to 1 on Trump?

I think it was 200 quid, which isn't much, but that guy stands to win about 30 grand right now.

That's a pretty good bet. Yeah. Kathleen, what about you? In terms of spread betting, do you see, are people betting a lot on

this, making spread bets on this, and are people betting on the way the financial system will

change depending on the result on November 8th? So even though we're about a month from the US presidential

...