It takes a brave person indeed to admit defeat. The slightly less-bullish crowd beat us in October, as gross gaming revenue came in at MOP18.9bn. It was a delightful new record, but it was MOP1.1bn (US$140m) less than our call. We so desperately wanted the MOP20bn barrier to be breached, we did. Alas, ’twas not to be.

We have our reasons for thinking why now was not the time. One of them may have been Singapore, which is taking an increasing share of outbound travel from China and can only have cut into Macau’s gaming stream by now – US$140m is not a lot of money in the bigger picture of the Asian gaming pie. Perhaps Gary Pinge is going to be proved right, after all. But whatever: we should have seen the Singapore competitive threat coming, too.

Still, it was a very nice number. And we would ask readers to cast their minds back to January this year, which was when we made the call – and most other analysts were still expecting YoY growth in the back half of the year to be flat. Well, blow us down, but this October was up 50% over last October – which itself was up 50% on January 2009.

The question is, then, how big can 4Q be? And what about next year? Sorry, but this time we’re not giving away our forecasts. All we can say at this stage is that we are unrepentant and remain above the average. Unless something big comes along, that is. Now, what could that possibly be?

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