Closer yes, but still a long way from Gambling. Margin trading is simply another tool to improve returns or use money for another purpose when you don’t want to cash in you stock. Want to buy a car and not cash in stock to do so? Use margin. Is that gambling? Want to sell a stock short? Use margin. Is buying a stock to go up not gambling but selling because you think it will go down is gambling? Want to sell a put to buy a stock at a better price and get paid for doing so? Requires margin. Not gambling. Want to buy high yield junk bonds but 8% isn’t enough for you, so margin it up and get 17%, now that is gambling.
You can’t use margin for penny stocks or any stock under $5, for IPOs, not supposed to for purchase of mutual funds. So there are rules to keep margin out of risky investments, but you can still take on more risk with margin than without. But in trading you have uncertainty but you also have a certain amount of control. In a casino, the lottery, a horse race., that is gambling. The odds are against you but if you win you get a big return. In investing the odds are with you and the returns are smaller and realized over longer periods of time. Like so many things, margin can be abused, and it makes investing a little more of a gamble because the risk often increases.
But it is still a lot different from gambling. For example, I do gamble at
Vegas Casino and that’s how I got to know that there is always a big difference between the two. I do use that casino because of their high deposit bonuses. When betting, there is an already predetermined odd/risk set by the bookie but, at leverage gambling, you have to set your level of risk by yourself.
Trading is gambling if you don’t know what you are doing. Trading with a margin account is necessary due to the nature of these markets. You need leverage to amplify your gains otherwise it wouldn’t be prudent to trade. The big boys have the capital to make enough profit for their time. The average trader needs a lot of leverage to do the same thing percentage wise.
This is why the less capital you have the harder it is and the more challenging and also why the big boys have such an easy time knocking 95% of the retail traders out of the market with a very small move.
A trader that is aware of what leverage can do for him may tend to increase the size of his trades as losses accumulate, hoping for a recovery in the very last moment. This approach can only work against the trader, and usually leads to margin calls and huge losses in trading accounts.
Leverage does not spare any trader from learning HOW to trade – a bad trader will continue to be a bad trader regardless of a possibly lucky trade made on high leverage that brought him a temporary big profit. High leverage creates an “everything is possible” illusion, which hides the enormous risk associated to this kind of trading.