I recently watched the first 4 episodes of Netflix's "Money, Explained" and one of its episodes discusses the mechanism of how our brains work when gambling. Personally, the "Gambling" episode was an eye-opener for me as I have gained a lot of interesting facts and different collective opinions which might give us a different point of view.
The Gist of the episode:The fourth episode is all about gambling, its history, the psychology behind it, the process of getting hooked into gambling as well the most alarming issue that I have heard where it says that day trading is just pure gambling.
One thing that we are all familiar with is the psychology that the gambling industry has evaluated to keep their customer to gamble by using the so-called "hooks". These hooks are something that will make people sit for long hours while making their gambling experience more enjoyable and enticing to make a lot of money. In effect, if these people have been "hooked", they will now fall under a mental state
[1] of total focus called the "The Zone". This means that the long hours of keeping people into gambling, the more money they can take out of other people's pockets.
These psychology tactics have also led other trading and investing company to use them to keep people unaware of the risk they are taking while being spammed with notifications of the current market sentiment, and an opportunity to get a free stock. Moreover, this episode also emphasizes that day trading is equivalent to gambling.
My take:I am aware that the argument about day trading as gambling or not has been discussed often before and it could be tiring to prove a particular point due to its subjective nature. One could say that day trading is a combination of little to non T. A and pure luck, others would say that day trading could never equate to gambling since the ability to read charts and proper risk management would decrease the percentage of getting rekt.
It will just result in a never-ending comparison.
References:[1]
https://www.peaksports.com/sports-psychology-blog/mindsets-to-help-athletes-perform-in-the-zone/Yes, in my opinion, trading on short time frames is the same as gambling.
In fact, there are no patterns on short-term timeframes that a trader could use to make a profit. The price can go up ... The price can go down ...
The game involves algorithmic bots. The human brain cannot compete with algorithms. Algorithms are faster. Medium-term or long-term exchange trading is another matter ...
This is a completely different matter. This kind of trading is not like gambling.
Investing is even less like gambling.