The best strategy in the Asian casino investment game has long been simple: shove all your chips to the middle of the table. Shares in the largest – the Macau operators and Genting Singapore – have at least doubled in the past five years. But this year they have underperformed, dropping about a tenth apiece. Time to cash in?

No. The sector’s weakness does make some sense. Growth stocks have taken a hit this year and some operators’ valuations were dizzying. At the turn of the year, ratios of enterprise values to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation had reached their highest levels since the operators began raking in the cash in 2010. The blockbuster performer, Galaxy Entertainment (up 70 per cent in a year, 2,888 per cent in five) had reached 27 times the past 12 months’ ebitda by late December. Now it is trading on 21. That remains high. The region’s broad entertainment sector averages 10. Genting, however, trades on a calming 13 times, down from a peak of 17. It beat first-quarter forecasts on Monday, with a 76 per cent jump in pre-tax profits.

Genting exemplifies one of the casinos’ strengths. They operate in tightly controlled markets. It runs one of two casinos in Singapore. The six Macau operators – Galaxy, Sands China, SJM Holdings, Wynn Macau, Melco Crown and MGM China – face table number caps, but not new competitors, leaving them to fight for a $44.4bn pie which grew by a fifth last year, even as China slowed. New markets in Manila, South Korea and Japan will eventually diminish Macau’s growth. These will limit licences too, though, and the big operators are likely to win them. A rigged game? Maybe, but rigged in favour of investors, for now