katies, motivator and chapel cottage - three of my all time favs

Was  his first wife, the actress Queenie Watts.?, think i read it somewhere.

I remember being at the Ayr Gold Cup , in the days when it was run on a Friday , and the winner of the said race was Not So Silly , owner T Ramsden . I also remember being at the Cheltenham Festival ( circa 89 ) and seeing Stearsby being led in through the crowd long after its race had finished ( I think it had refused , possibly at the water jump ) and it smacked its nose right into some unsuspecting racegoers back , and it left his jacket covered in mucky froth from around its mouth/bit .
Also remember seeing T.Ramsden being interviewed on " Arc " day , and his entourage were suffering from food poisoning after eating out in Paris the previous day .
His lifestyle was always liable to produce the spectacular implosion that befell him !

His entourage are richer than him , i wonder where they were when he was bang in trouble.?

Any updates?

Meanwhile an old article I stumbled on.

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A great character, people like him got so many people involved in the sport

worth a watch^ enjoy

..."a man who was trying to show his own people (the working class )that it is a sport to participate in for all".   It's the sport of Kings ydc. Always will be.

Never heard anyone describe Tel as a nasty piece of work, everyone seemed to like him......autobiography would be enjoyable I'm sure.

Here is a decent description of the Japanese Warrant Market - Terry gets a mention.

US$435bn equity-linked boom
This period offered Japan’s Big Four securities firms an incredible opportunity to make money, which they took with both hands. The rise in equity prices and a voracious appetite among Japanese companies for capital created the perfect conditions for equity-linked issuance, which enabled borrowers to pay ultra-low running yields in return for giving investors exposure to stock that was always going to move quickly beyond strike or conversion prices.

Warrants were in essence an extremely cheap way of creating leveraged exposure to the Japanese stock market. In the bubble years of 1986 through to 1990, Japanese companies issued a staggering US$435bn in Eurobonds-with-warrants and convertibles. While many blue chips tapped the market, so too did hundreds of SMEs from the TSE’s Second Section that were virtually unknown outside Japan.

An essential tool for every warrant market participant in those days was the Japan Company Handbook, split into one volume for First Section companies and another for Second Section companies. Volume two in particular was an invaluable guide, with short company descriptions and some basic financials – not that investors were remotely bothered by company fundamentals in a one-way market that had not at that point seen a single default by an offshore issuer. For issuers, the economics were too good to pass up: by adding equity optionality they could save hundreds of basis points on coupons versus Eurodollar straights.

As the bubble expanded, so did issue sizes. By 1989, a veritable Who’s Who of corporate Japan – Nissan, Toyota, Japan Airlines, Toshiba, Canon, Nippon Steel, Kobe Steel, Matsushita, Sumitomo Corp, Asahi Breweries, Mitsubishi Corp, Mitsui & Co, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, C Itoh and others – were selling US$1bn-plus issues. Through the combination of yen cashflows from option exercise as warrants sailed through strike prices and a very favourable basis swap (yen interest rates were some five percentage points lower than US interest rates), issuers could effectively receive free or even negative-cost funding.

The bond with warrants phenomenon created a huge and ultra-profitable market for underwriters, traders and market-makers that developed a culture all its own. The Japanese Big Four controlled 85%–90% of all Eurobond-with-warrants and Euroconvertible underwriting, led by Nomura (at the time easily the biggest investment bank in the world by market cap). The fact that most warrant buyers were Japanese investors and that issuers swapped the predominantly US dollar-denominated stubs (the ex-bonds) into floating-rate yen gave the Japanese firms a stranglehold on the market.

Beyond the leading underwriters, the market attracted a huge entourage of non-Japanese market-makers and proprietary traders made up of most of the leading US, UK and European investment banks and brokers as well as specialist warrant-trading firms such as the legendary Cresvale (whose founders Steve Burnham and Malcolm Stevenson made huge personal fortunes as the market went inexorably higher).

Masaaki Goto, chairman of Daiwa Capital Markets Europe, arrived for his first tour of duty in London in 1987, five years after joining the firm in Tokyo, to work on bonds-with-warrants and convertible new issues.

“Eurobonds with warrants became a cheaper alternative to domestic funding; by 1985, everyone had rushed into the market and there were three to four deals a week, sometimes more,” he recalled. “Everyone thought the Nikkei would carry on going up.” Indeed, while the Nikkei did suffer during the global stock market crash of 1987, its decline was muted and prices had regained previous levels within five months.

“Warrant trading was very profitable,” Goto continued. “But warrants became purely speculative tools and they were unsophisticated insofar as few people used models to correctly price option value. In that respect, pricing was inefficient and issues were almost all under-priced, so would invariably pop on launch; the offered side very quickly became the bid side and participants were effectively guaranteed a profit. The Big Four Japanese securities houses were big underwriters and market-makers but the huge liquidity in the market attracted a large number of players.”

The market also attracted some colourful characters and acquired a racy, somewhat spivvy character. Prop traders and speculators would engage in any number of option strategies using cheap warrants: synthetic convertibles (warrant baskets plus government bonds); cash extraction (short stock, long warrant baskets); volatility trading (long warrant baskets, short Nikkei futures) and a host of others.

The infamous Terry Ramsden made his fortune trading Japanese warrants. A brash, cocky trader from the mid-1970s, Ramsden amassed a huge fortune during the 1980s, estimated at above £100m, through Japanese warrant trading. He ostentatiously flaunted his wealth, lived a playboy lifestyle, had his own plane, houses and supercars around the world, as well as a string of racehorses. He would bet fortunes on horses, including a fabled £1m on a single race.

He used his huge stockpile of warrants to command big stakes in specific companies, causing huge upset in the conservative Japanese financial community in 1985 by launching (unsuccessfully) a hostile takeover of ball-bearing and electronics parts manufacturer Minebea Co, a regular issuer of bonds with warrants, through his warrant stockpile.

In the end, he went bankrupt and was then jailed for attempting to conceal funds from the court.

The stock market and real estate bubbles ultimately proved unsustainable and the inevitable happened: from its 1989 high the Nikkei entered a 10-year decline to a low of just over 7,000 in March 2009, equivalent to a fall of 82%. Even by late August 2013, the index was trading below 13,500.

Mark Prescott, talking about the Druids Lodge Confederacy:

"Like coursing and boxing, racing has always been about yobs and snobs. There was no middle class."

https://www.racingpost.com/news/the-druids-lodge-confederates-the-league-of-gentlemen-and-a-legendary-gamble/248075

you just know whatever hes got hes gonna gamble till its gone,even if the **** market crashing hadnt done for him,eventually the gambling losses would have.

all the best to him now in whatever hes doing though

Thanks Screaming - I ought to have guessed it might have been Sir Mark.

One day at Newmarket on the July course in 1987, Ramsden had owned two winners.

I went up to the William Hill pitch on the rails to back my selection in a later race, in which Ramsden had the favourite. A horse which would have given him a treble.

He was at the William Hill pitch negoiating a price for his horse. The rep saw me behind him and asked Terry to step aside for a moment, as I was a very regular player.

Ramsden did so like a gentleman and when he heard the horse I wanted to back he said to me 'don't you like mine, mate?'

I said it was a bit short for me and had £50 EW on my selection at 9/2 (if memory serves me correctly). As I walked away, Ramsden wished me good luck and I replied that if my one didn't win I wanted it to at least finish in the frame (for the ew) to his. He laughed.

Anyway, the race was off and his was nowhere but my one won it - I think ridden by the ill-fated P Barnard.

As my wife and I came down off the stand, Terry called me over and said 'come and have a drink mate, I want to know how to pick winners!'.

Now, in reality, I don't think it was my horse racing knowledge he was primarily after. No, my wife in the 80's was a bit of a looker (still is if a touch older) with the big hair and shoulder pads dress etc. I think Ramsden had his eye on her a bit!

Anyway, we went with him to the owners bar. He left us with his two bodyguards while he went off to talk to his trainer about the run of his horse but when he came back we had a brilliant 40 minutes chatting, missing out the next race. He really didn't seem to know horse racing form that much but was very good company.

My wife and I had to leave because I wanted a bet in the final race (I wasn't going to leave her with him!) and I told Terry what horse I was backing in the race and of a dog I was going to back in a big final at Catford that night. Out came his mobile and I am pretty sure as I left he was backing the horse and the dog in an EW double.

The horse came third at 8/1 but the dog won at 7/2. So, he would have got his money back on the EW and at least I did not contribute to his bankruptcy!

I was always sad what happened to him later that year when the markets crashed but he was a proper fella, although clearly a bit of a chancer,

I would love to track him down and write his biography - his story would be a great read, I'm sure.

At his bankruptcy hearing the judge reportedly said that he felt the banks pulling the plug a bit early was a major factor in his downfall and that they would have done better to prop him up until the markets came back - which it did by the following spring.

think a lot of us can relate to blokes like terry r and harry findlay, both come from working class backgrounds, no posh accents and public school educations  they give hope to us that it is possible to get near  where they have been ,who on here has not dreamed of walking up to a on course bookie with a wedge the thickness of a bible and saying "£20 grand on number 5 at 9/2 please . harry said punting is the greatest game in the world and he aint wrong .the feeling of a big win is almost unmatched , my non gambling brother in law saw me put a large bet on (large for re anyway )  it got beat and he said fook i would be gutted and have the hump for days if i had lost that money ,how long will you have the hump for ? about 30 seconds i said .

Very true Cardinal very true

I'll second the above post...especially with The Knight's contribution - you really should indulge on here more often squire

I liked Terry Ramsden who always came across as a good guy but Fronter is spot on. He seemed to be on self destruct and would have lost the lot no matter what.

Agreed mac those three books were pitiful