Premium Bonds

And if you don't win the jackpot ever, and most people don't, then your yield will be lower.

"Jonathan Bryce" wrote

... to the tune of around 1.20 per month, if you hold the full 30K maximum - ie less than about 0.05% lower, at just over 3.15%pa..

Of course he's splitting hairs, he can't help it. It's not the term "statistically" that's the problem, but "should", which in street-talk tends to carry a stronger meaning than you intended. Had you used the magic word "expected", he'd have shut up.

In a context where X is necessarily a non-negative integer, "X should be at least one" is synonymous with "X should not be zero". That's too strong a statement to make when in fact there's a good chance that quite a few months will have no wins. This will happen in almost as many months as will have two or more wins. You would have been less likely to be called to task had you simply omitted the words "at least".

Increasing the number of larger prizes does not, per se, increase the likelihood of winning one of them as the number of premium bonds in the draw has also probably grown. Although I don't have the facts to hand, it's entirely possible that the above phrase is designed to fool the less clued up. However, I'm willing to concede your point if you have the figures to back it up.

I didn't intend imply anything. Infact, I was careful not to say that at least one "would" win. There's an important semantic difference between "should" and "would".

...just as some people would believe that more high-valued prizes means better chances of winning one of them - unfortunately your emphasis of this fact could be just as misleading when it's taken out of context (i.e. not mentioned as a percentage of the number of bonds in circulation). Now if you said what *percentage* of prizes are larger ones, that would make much more sense...

A simple "nope" would have done - too much information, methinks.

This bit I'm less convinced about - they don't call a certain class of Cambridge maths students "wranglers" for nowt!!! ;)

ciao, RM

I still think it's worth sticking a grand or so in, as at least then you have some chance of winning a big prize (ie greater than none at all) which gives you a pretty good possible return for the risk.

I put it to you that you only think this because you are better off than the OP, and can afford to lose half the interest on a gamble.

A "pretty good" POSSIBLE return is certainly not pretty good if the possible never becomes reality. It's mug-bait worthy of Readers Digest prize draw blurb: You've come through stage N of our draw and your numbers will now be entered into stage N+1, where you might win a chance of being entered into stage N+2. If you win stage N+5, you could win a million pounds, or a free year's subscription.

"Alex" wrote

At that amount, you'd expect, on average (using current rates), one prize every 2 years -- and (again, on average) you'd expect to win the million only once every "just over 2 million years" !!

Someone in the January draw has won 5k on a 1 bond, total holding 1, purchased in Jul-62.