Flutter’s US gamble enters a new phase after its LSE delisting

At 8am on 3 August, Flutter Entertainment’s shares will quietly stop trading in London, ending a listed lineage that began with Paddy Power’s float in December 2000. The company blamed thin trading volumes and the cost and regulatory burden of a dual listing; from August, the world’s largest online gambling group will trade solely in New York, where its primary listing has sat since May 2024.

Flutter leaves the UK at a challenging moment: the shares are down nearly half this year and around 60% over 12 months, cutting a market value that topped $50 billion last summer to around $19 billion. 

It is tempting to read those two facts together – the move to Wall Street and the collapse in the share price – as cause and effect, another warning about a company that chased higher valuations in America and found American volatility instead. 

But perhaps the real question hanging over Flutter is whether the US market it staked everything on still has the profile investors were promised when the company packed for New York: continued legalisation, a settled duopoly and years of profitable growth. On all three counts, the picture has blurred. 

The listing is not the issue 

Start by dealing with the listing question. “There’s no reason to think any of this would be different if they were still listed in London,” says a senior US-based financial stock analyst that iGB has spoken to. “I don’t know how many investors would only invest in London and not in the US. The pool of capital is bigger in the US.”

Earlier examples cut both ways, he notes. Light & Wonder scrapped its dual listing for an ASX-only listing after its valuation fell, while Aristocrat is valued more highly partly because Australia’s smaller stock market has few high-quality listed companies. 

Deutsche Bank, cited in a recent Scott Longley column, drew the same lesson from Flutter itself: a US listing “does not automatically deliver favourable outcomes”, and deeper liquidity can amplify bad news through heavier trading and easier shorting. 

Ben Robinson, managing partner at Corfai, is similarly unsentimental about Flutter’s exit. “It’s hard to argue with the mechanics,” he says. “The primary listing moved to New York in 2024, London had become a shrinking secondary line and the volumes no longer justified the cost. The real loss is marginal and symbolic. Some UK funds with LSE-only mandates become forced sellers, and a company built on Paddy Power and Betfair has cut its last formal tie to its home market.” Whether that matters, he adds, “depends on whether Flutter ever needs London again. My instinct is it won’t.” 

Chad Beynon, senior gaming, lodging and theatres analyst at Macquarie, sees no reason for regret either. “The US has the largest and most liquid equity market in the world,” he says, pointing to institutional depth, retail participation and a lower cost of capital for the group. The postcode, all three agree in effect, is irrelevant. What has driven the stock is the story. 

Rethinking the US opportunity 

And the story has changed. “Until the prediction-market shake-up, yes,” says Robinson, asked whether the American pivot delivered what investors expected. “FanDuel built a 39% share of US sportsbook and the move stateside looked like the trade of the decade. Since then the stock has lost around 60% in a year, with the market increasingly questioning a growth story built partly on new states opening. Kalshi and Polymarket can now reach customers in California, Texas and Florida without waiting for conventional sports-betting licences, and that opportunity has been repriced.” 

The numbers behind the repricing are stark. Robinson notes that Kalshi generated more than $30 billion of volume in June “while operating across markets that conventional sportsbooks still cannot fully access. That reduces the scarcity value of future state licences.”

Growth in regulated states has matured at the same time, he says: “That looks more like a structural re-rating than a blip.”

Beynon frames the same wound from the equity side: in states where betting is legal, prediction markets’ financial impact “has been minimal” – but “investors are discounting the future growth of the US legal market, or at least the duopoly between DraftKings and FanDuel”. 

Investors are no longer just cutting their short-term expectations. They are asking whether the two-company market that drove high valuations can last, and whether California and Texas will still be open to opportunities when they arrive. 

The push for legalisation, meanwhile, has slowed. The hypothesis, as the US analyst puts it, was that states would rather tax legal sportsbooks than watch money flow to federally regulated contracts beyond their reach. “But it’s been slow. If anything, you’ve seen tax increases. North Carolina has increased taxes, and now Ohio has introduced a bill to end sports betting, which is pretty bizarre when you think about it. You’d still have prediction markets.” 

The business carrying the weight 

Is Flutter, then, over-reliant on America? “The reliance is real, but the picture is shifting,” says Robinson. The US, roughly 40% of group revenue, “grew just 6% in Q1, with handle down 9% and US EBITDA down 26%. International grew 27%, although that was driven largely by Snai and Betnacional and was broadly flat organically. For now, the international business everyone stopped talking about is doing the heavy lifting.”

Amy Howe’s abrupt exit from FanDuel in May fits the pattern: “The FanDuel leadership change suggests the board wanted tighter oversight too,” says Robinson. 

That puts pressure on the division Flutter spent two years reducing its focus on: internationally, “whether growth holds once Snai and Betnacional annualise”, in the UK, “the first full quarter under 40% RGD”, after remote gaming duty nearly doubled in April. Flutter estimates a $320 million pre-mitigation EBITDA hit in 2026, rising to $540 million in 2027.  

“The key question is whether mitigation comes from genuine cost savings or lower marketing, which may protect margins now but weaken future growth.”  

Higher UK taxes have historically squeezed out smaller rivals – as seen with the consolidation around Evoke and Bally’s – and handed Flutter share. The US analyst says the question is whether that playbook still runs. 

Flutter’s two paths forward 

How does the US market move forward? The US analyst outlines two paths: “Either Flutter needs to start taking share in prediction markets – perhaps as a market maker rather than through an exchange – or investors need confidence that prediction markets won’t be a serious, long-term headwind.”

Flutter’s late-2025 launch of FanDuel Predicts, via an exchange partnership with CME Group, has had a quieter start than DraftKings’ product. Making money from the risk, not just providing the platform, may be the key to making prediction markets profitable rather than just defensive. 

Failing that, the industry waits on the courts, where the outcome remains uncertain. Nevada has successfully restricted Kalshi, Robinson notes, but the Third Circuit ruled in its favour against New Jersey, and “there is no binding nationwide answer today”. The balance is not even either: “Nevada matters less commercially than California, Texas and Florida, where the central threat remains intact.”

The US analyst expects everything to roll up to the Supreme Court, with no final answer “before late 2027 at the earliest, and more likely sometime in the first half of 2028”. Until then, “there’s a risk that these stocks trade sideways”. 

There is also a concern rarely discussed: if courts eventually block sports prediction contracts, companies that invested in them “will certainly hope they’re not punished by state legislators for having been involved”, he says. “If regulators decide companies were on the wrong side of the issue, they may not be welcomed back quite so easily.” 

Will New York deliver Flutter’s promised gains? 

None of this has reduced the transatlantic allure. Allwyn – newly consolidated with Greece’s OPAP, listed in Athens and buying into the US via PrizePicks – is weighing a secondary listing in London or New York.

The US analyst reads it as “a bit of an arbitrage play” adding, “you’re becoming a much larger player in a smaller market – a big fish in a smaller pond”.

Beynon rejects the idea that listings compete at all: “We don’t view listed gaming company investments as a ‘zero-sum game’.” And the US analyst insists Flutter’s destination was right: “I still think the US is the gold standard for capital markets.” 

Robinson’s verdict is subtler. “Premature is the instinct, but the maths probably supports it,” he says of the full exit – although he detects “an element of message in the timing too: London doubled gaming duty months before Flutter cut its last tie.” 

His final warning, however, is about where the company is going, not where it came from. The S&P 500’s run to record highs has been carried by a narrow band of AI, semiconductor and mega-cap technology stocks; strip those out and the gains since 2023 look far less remarkable, Robinson notes.

“So the question isn’t whether New York is deeper than London. It’s which arm of the K Flutter sits on. Down around 60% in a year, the risk is it becomes just another mid-tier consumer stock on a bigger exchange. Deeper water doesn’t help if the current is moving somewhere else.”