Having plunged a massive $25 in the office Calcutta[1] to buy Makybe Diva, I came out well ahead in the Emirates[2] Melbourne Cup this year. By my calculation, I’m now $20 ahead on a lifetime basis. A nice bottle of red should bring me back to par.
fn1. The pool was over $150, and the mare started about 5/1 so I could have made a neat $25 in arbitrage profits if I’d had time to run to the TAB. Since I didn’t, I stuck with my position and pocketed a neat $100.
fn2. I really can’t take this. The Fosters Melbourne Cup was a bit strange, but at least Fosters Lager is a quintessentially Melbourne product. What’s next? The McDonalds Anzac Day march?
John Quiggin 
Here in Sydney, Emirates just moved their office from one floor of a dodgy little 1950s building (only 15 yards wide and with loos on the half floors of the stairwell) into a skyscraper with their name on the top. One of the few airlines doing particularly well post 9/11.
Congrats on your successful non-arbitrage.
The XXXX JohnQuiggin blog
Or the Crown Lager(tm) John Quiggin Blog.
Left wing without the working class overtones.
It gets worse, the official beer was Toohey’s dry. A NSW beer, and a rather undrinkable one at that.
If Quiggin was Victorian we’d have to make him an honorary Mountain Goat man…
I drew She’s Archie in the Griffith Politics & Public Policy Sweep, so I got my $5 back for getting the last placed horse. My attempts to add value at the TAB by taking Winning Belle and Hard To Get for a place, in quinellas with Makybe Diva and in a boxed first 4 with Makybe Diva and Vinnie Roe, turned out to be somewhat expensive failures.
However my conscience is clear, for the following reasons. For people who know what they’re doing, the Melbourne Cup is the easiest race of all to pick. The established winning form patterns through the lead-up races are few in number and very well studied. And in some years (such as this one) all the revealed form and all lines of reasoning about the form point to one horse as the obvious winner.
The ethical problem with this is that part of the value of the dividend for knowledgeable punters from backing an obvious shoo-in like Makybe Diva comes at the expense of once-a-year punters, including children, pensioners and other people of limited means, who bet their $1 on the basis of sentiment, numerology, liking the horse’s name, astrology, etc. Thus to make money by backing Makybe Diva for a win would have been, if not theft, a form of knowing and wilful exploitation of an information asymmetry at the expense of the poor – a petty version of the sort of chicanery exposed by Joe Stiglitz in his latest book.
Therefore I refused on principle to back Makybe Diva straight out, tried to add value with two horses which are now the subject of an air-sea search and rescue operation, and saved my soul for a net financial loss of $19.