Regulation

neillaw

Hello,

My father and I both have 50k in premium bonds and without fail he wins more than I do every single month (for about 50ish months)

I'm sure it's all above board...  But I am thinking the odds of this are higher than winning the lottery!  Anyone heard anything similar to this happening before?  I did question this once to NS&I and they assured me everything was fine, but seems obvious there is some kind of glitch / bug (without thinking more sinister!)  Either that or it's truly a very lucky, or unlucky, chance

Thanks,
Neil

la531983

Its random. What more of an explanation do you need?

jimjames

If you want guaranteed earnings every month then move the money into a savings account currently paying 6%. That way you'll get £250 every month without fail. Not sure how much you get from your PBs but I suspect the average is less than that.

oldernonethewiser

neillaw said:

Hello,

My father and I both have 50k in premium bonds and without fail he wins more than I do every single month (for about 50ish months)

I'm sure it's all above board...  But I am thinking the odds of this are higher than winning the lottery!  Anyone heard anything similar to this happening before?  I did question this once to NS&I and they assured me everything was fine, but seems obvious there is some kind of glitch / bug (without thinking more sinister!)  Either that or it's truly a very lucky, or unlucky, chance

Thanks,
Neil

What makes you think that?

As above, it is random.

If you are not very happy stick the money somewhere that guarantees a return on savings, which Premium Bonds explicitly do not.

43722

The next big win is guaranteed to be your's. Perhaps.

MattMattMattUK

Random always results in what appear to be statistical anomalies when you choose only two examples in a massive data set.

The average interest rate on Premium Bonds is not great and it is even worse when you consider how the larger prizes skew the overall balance. As others have said you should be able to get 6% or more in savings interest, or 8%+ if you invested the amount (though of course it could go down).

friolento

jimjames said:

If you want guaranteed earnings every month then move the money into a savings account currently paying 6%. That way you'll get £250 every month without fail. Not sure how much you get from your PBs but I suspect the average is less than that.

£250 before tax

DullGreyGuy

neillaw said:

My father and I both have 50k in premium bonds and without fail he wins more than I do every single month (for about 50ish months)

I'm sure it's all above board...  But I am thinking the odds of this are higher than winning the lottery!  Anyone heard anything similar to this happening before?  I did question this once to NS&I and they assured me everything was fine, but seems obvious there is some kind of glitch / bug (without thinking more sinister!)  Either that or it's truly a very lucky, or unlucky, chance

People are very poor at understanding randomness, there are very few things in life that are truly random so maybe it's understandable. 

There was a hoo-ha a while back about one of the music services/apps and its random play, people questioning how is it random that it played the same song 5 times in a row or it played a 100 song playlist in the exact order it was in. That's the thing, these are both statistically improbable but absolutely can happen in a truly random event. They then changed the process, they made it less random by adding rules like not selecting the same song twice etc and the number of complaints that the shuffle wasn't random fell off a cliff.

My family have long claimed premium bonds are rigged, but they like wearing tin foil hats. It sounds like you are just unluckier 

dunstonh

Anyone heard anything similar to this happening before?

NS&I Premium bonds are like a tombola.    Have you ever been in a large tombola where you get several people win multiple times, whilst most win nothing and the remainder win once?      

but seems obvious there is some kind of glitch / bug (without thinking more sinister!)  Either that or it's truly a very lucky, or unlucky, chance

It is a game of chance.   You are either lucky or unlucky.

EthicsGradient

neillaw said:

Hello,

My father and I both have 50k in premium bonds and without fail he wins more than I do every single month (for about 50ish months)

I'm sure it's all above board...  But I am thinking the odds of this are higher than winning the lottery!  Anyone heard anything similar to this happening before?  I did question this once to NS&I and they assured me everything was fine, but seems obvious there is some kind of glitch / bug (without thinking more sinister!)  Either that or it's truly a very lucky, or unlucky, chance

Thanks,
Neil

The good news was that your father had a really lucky run - winning every single month for about 4 years, including when the prize draw was quite small up to about a year ago. How much did you get, and how much did he?

Notepad_Phil

neillaw said:

...
 Either that or it's truly a very lucky, or unlucky, chance
...

Are you relying on your father telling you how much he's won or do you have access to his holders number to check directly? If the former then perhaps he's being a bit mischievous and kidding you on (it's something I could well imagine my late father doing if he had been lucky enough to have had that amount of money in premium bonds).

If he really has won more than you every month, which also means that he has never had a month with no winnings, then it is a very small percentage chance, but with the number of participants in the draw it's going to happen to someone and it's as likely to be you as someone else in the same situation.