FANCY a flutter on the markets? Like it or not, you're having one, and a big one too. Not so sure about the fund managers, though. You are in, even if you do not own a property or have a private pension scheme. In, even if you're not a taxpayer. With the NAMA bank rescue scheme, we are all taking a punt.

Much of the comment -- including this newspaper's -- calls this a "gamble". But there are two kinds of gambling. Some, like throwing dice, are purely a matter of luck. Others, like poker, require skill and experience for success.

Playing the markets should be like the second kind. There ought to be considerable research into the potential investments beforehand. Even then, the best returns will come to those with the skill and experience to place the right kind of bet -- and cash it in at the right time.

Or else wait a very long time. In all the pre-NAMA legislation excitement, the recent results from the National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) did not get the attention they deserved. The NPRF is the perfect stock market play: big enough to invest across the market in several different countries, and with a 25-year investment horizon.

Yet, after seven years of investment, the NPRF has not made a red cent. This tells you the length and depth of the bear market which began in 2001, and which most market commentators refuse to call by its proper name.

It also tells you how tricky it is for individuals to win on share investments -- even more so if they are paying ridiculous fees for managed funds, which are the only way for most individuals to make such investments.

That is the case even if one takes the view that shares are a good long-term investment. The term can be very long indeed; uncomfortably long for a mere mortal investor. But history suggests the NPRF should do pretty well over a 25-year timeframe. Except that it, too, has now been "Nama'd".

The next few years' contributions of around €6bn to the pension fund will not be used to follow international indices, but will go into the shares of the two big Irish banks. The figure is imprecise, because we do not yet know what the banks' losses will be on the loans they transfer to NAMA, and therefore how much fresh capital they will need. Nor do we know how much of it will have to come from government.

Crisis

Fund manager Brian Lenihan seems keen to keep his investments as small as possible. After all, he has his own cashflow problems. He explained this very effectively on RTE's 'Morning Ireland' when he pointed out that the banking crisis is separate from the budget crisis.

There would still be a banking crisis even if there were no budget crisis (see Germany) and a budget crisis even if there were no banking one (see Spain). It is unfortunate, to say, the least, to have both (see Ireland, UK, USA, in order of severity), and does indeed smack of carelessness.

The budget crisis makes Mr Lenihan reluctant to put capital into the banks. For that he needs real money, whereas he is buying the loans with a huge IOU, to be paid at some unknown date in the future.

So the investors -- us -- have every reason to be nervous. The normal order of things has been reversed. The decision to invest was taken before the research into what is being bought was carried out. It is still not complete. The evidence suggests that Mr Lenihan is not even thinking of how to make the best possible return on his investments.

We do have one advantage not normally available to an investor. We decide the price for these assets, not the market, and not the sellers. But the conundrum on this is by now well known.

The lower the price paid (and therefore the better the potential investment), the more capital the banks will need to stop them going under. Beyond a certain point, AIB at least might end up nationalised, which could have been done a lot simpler and cheaper in the first place.

So the temptation for the Government is to pay a higher price, so that the banks can stay on the stock market and tap private capital, rather than borrowed state capital.

It has to be said that there is merit in this policy of avoiding borrowing as much as possible in the present budgetary crisis -- even, perhaps, if NAMA's critics turn out to be right and it is merely borrowing postponed into what one hopes will be better times, and spread out over many years.

Despite these considerations, it is hard to avoid the feeling that Mr Lenihan is neglecting his fund management role.

Even allowing for the policies of no nationalisation and encouragement of private capital, the taxpayer is entitled to ask that he strike a hard bargain with the capitalists, so as to get the best return for those press-ganged capitalists, the Irish citizens. These citizens have already placed the bet that NAMA will work, which would make bank shares an attractive long-term investment.

The NAMA legislation says that future state capital will be in the form of equity shares. Gains on that could offset some of the risks on the even greater flutter which NAMA must take on the property market.

Yet capturing those potential gains is not the tone of government policy. It is, rather, that the State's capital will be replaced by private capital at the earliest opportunity, with little or no concern for the return.

We have seen already that the terms of the first injections of capital mean the taxpayer will not benefit from the recent rise in bank shares. It must be admitted that private capital holds most of the cards in this game. It knows the banks will not be allowed to fail, and it knows that nationalisation is a last resort.

Perhaps the Government let it know too much.

But it does not hold all the cards. Mr Lenihan, fund manager, should perhaps do what many professional investors do: set a target for the return on his money at which he will sell out and "ring fence" the State's holding in the banks until he gets it.

The markets will fuss and whine but, if NAMA works, they will come on board in the end. If it doesn't, then none of this matters anyway.

- Brendan Keenan