Pictet people

George Bennett, Client Relationship Officer at Pictet Asset Services, first encountered racing on visits to his grandparents in South Africa at four years old. They owned racehorses in Pietermaritzburg, and George would spend his days watching the blur of horses, learning to pick out the family’s blue and gold ‘silks’ - the distinctive jackets and caps worn by a horse’s rider so that it can be recognised at speed.

Back home, his father never shared any enthusiasm for the sport, however in George, it found its way into the next generation. The place where his fascination deepened was Newmarket, two hours north of London, where George arrived at age seven, as a boarding-school pupil.

Newmarket is a small English market town of Georgian terraces, village greens and open countryside. Tiny and intensely international at once, it is to global horse racing what Silicon Valley is to technology: a place where talent, capital, reputation and ambition have long been concentrated. From celebrated Irish breeders to wealthy owners flying in from the Gulf in search of the next champion, people travel from around the world to this small corner east of Cambridge, to buy, train and watch horses.

Friends’ parents bred horses, prepared them for race days or advised owners on which ones to buy. Famous jockeys were familiar faces around town. By the time George was 11 or 12, racing had become part of his everyday language. “It’s something you absorb without really noticing,” he says. “You pick up who the big-name trainers and the rising-star jockeys are, which horses people are talking about. It’s all around you.”

The romance of it is perhaps most evident at dawn. By six o’clock every Saturday morning, owners and trainers can be found standing high on a ridge outside town. Scrutinising their horses exercising on the gallops - long stretches of open grass reserved for training racehorses - they are searching for the smallest signs of form that might become glimmers of success on the racetrack.

It was at 18 that George saw the financial end of the sport at unusually close quarters when fresh out of school, he went to work at Tattersalls, the Newmarket auction house and one of Europe’s leading centres for buying and selling racehorses. “The sums involved can be extraordinary. The most sought-after young horses can sell for the equivalent of several million pounds before they have ever raced professionally,” explains George.

His job title was ‘spotter’, which sounds more glamorous than he insists it was. The reality was stranger, and perhaps more interesting.

“Spotters stand around the auction ring, watching the buyers rather than the horse.” A bid worth hundreds of thousands of pounds might amount to little more than the lift of a hand or a book, or the slightest glance towards the auctioneer. George’s job was to see it: to ‘spot’ it, and to indicate it to the auctioneer, to keep the sale moving.

Some buyers deliberately make themselves difficult for rival bidders to see, crouching behind the auction ring seating or positioning themselves out of sight while remaining just visible enough for their bid to be recognised. If a well-respected owner begins bidding, others might take it as a signal that this horse is worth paying attention to, pushing the price higher. Consigning yourself to the shadows makes it harder for rival bidders to draw conclusions.

George learnt to read the regulars: where certain buyers liked to sit, how they signalled and which minute motion might suddenly put another enormous sum of money into play. “There was something almost choreographed about it: an auction involving millions conducted through glances, gestures and the almost imperceptible movement of a book.”

Tattersalls also taught George something more enduring: how to handle the kind of international, extremely wealthy clients he would encounter later in his career in financial services. “They were very switched on,” he says. “Things had to happen in the right way, and to a clear timeframe. ‘It might take a week or so’ wasn’t really an answer. They wanted to know when.”

Years later, managing relationships in finance, the setting is different, but the instinct is not. It means noticing what matters to people, understanding how they like to operate and adjusting accordingly. “You get under someone’s skin a bit,” George says. “You work out what they expect from you, how they like things done, what they care about.”

Between investment roles, George spent a short period working for a bookmaker – a company that sets the odds and takes bets on sporting events. It gave him a glimpse of racing from the other side: not simply who might win, but how much could be learnt from the flow of information around a race. A bet from somebody known to have a connection with a horse could itself be a clue to potential success. Patterns emerged in who backed what, and when. For George, it reinforced something racing had been teaching him for years: everyone is searching for the piece of information that others have missed.

The parallel with investing is difficult to miss. “You can keep gathering information, but you’re never going to have all of it,” George says. “The hardest decisions with the richest rewards are usually the ones that nobody can prove in advance.”

For all the analysis, much of racing’s hold on George is far less cerebral, as he discovered when he and a group of friends bought a racehorse together, sharing the costs of its training – and, if things went well, the winnings.

Their horse was hardly destined for racing immortality. Its trainer was accustomed to far more promising animals and eventually became so keen to free up the horse’s stable that he offered to waive his training fees if the group would take the horse elsewhere. George laughs as he tells the story. “We loved it, though. It was a great time.”

The horse only ever won three races - a trivial number - confirming what the friends had always suspected: very few racehorse owners make money, and most know the odds from the outset. Yet knowing the odds does little to extinguish the hope that your horse might be the exception.

For George the true returns were found in the early mornings on the gallops, before most of the town had woken; in conversations with trainers; in the nervous anticipation before a race; and in the brief, exhilarating possibility that today, everything might finally come together.

George would like to experience it again, pooling money with friends and sharing the highs and lows together. And if he can, he would like to restore one more piece of the family inheritance. “I’d love to bring my grandparents’ colours back,” he says. “To have a horse in my own name, racing in those silks. It’s a family crest of sorts.”