Topic: The fine line between market investment and sports gambling - page 2. (Read 1459 times)

As you state the scenarios are infinite, this is something that I have not thought because it would have never occurred to me to try to solve my debt problems through gambling but this is in fact quite common for those that are desperate and do not want to go through the trouble of solving their problems the old fashioned way, it is important to remember that gambling should be done only as a way to entertain yourself and if you happen to earn some money then be happy about it but you should not try to make it your profession.

This is a very interesting topic for me as I often wonder about the same.

I think the concepts have similarities but also are different in some ways. Why? Well, there are some high-risk investing practices and volatile stocks. In this case, I agree that investing is pretty much identical as betting or gambling. You give your money without having any idea what the outcome will be. Plus, as some of you said, the stock market is often an unfair place to be, and people with small budget can easily lose everything if they can't afford to wait out periods when the stock prices go down.

On the other hand, I'd say there are the stable stocks like Microsoft for example that generally move in a positive direction and give dividends. So, you get there in order to slowly grow your investment and possibly save money for retirement or whatever. I wouldn't place these investments in the same basket as betting and gambling. Sure, there's always the chance that something will go wrong. But still, I think these chances are small and if you read the news etc. you can probably react in time to cash in your profits.

So, my overall opinion is divided in half. If you buy new stocks and see what happens or invest in volatile stocks like Tesla that can easily grow by 50% but also drop by 60%, you are gambling in a way.

Also, to me the main difference is what money you use for investing. If you invest your retirement fund in stable investment opportunities hoping to slowly grow it, then I wouldn't say you're gambling. If you get some $5,000 you are ready to lose and just want to see what will happen by investing them in some new stock that can prove awesome or terrible, then you're gambling. You can easily decide to bet those $5,000 on a football match or place them on red on roulette and see what happens. If you are ready to lose the money, you are always gambling.

I don't know if this makes sense to you. 

Exactly, it's hard to drive reasonable conclusions from simply high bets. I used to assume that these people must be very rich to afford losing thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes, but there's also another side of the coin. Sometimes poor people, who aren't gambling addicts, but simply are up to the neck in debts, see gambling as a quick opportunity to win and settle their debts. Recently there was a post here from a person like that. At first, they decided to make an investment, but that took too long, so they switched to gambling, which resulted in even more debts...

We have no way to know what is behind the high rollers that we see at the casino, there maybe a lot of reasons why they behave this way, many high rollers have too much bitcoin already and most likely they are just gambling with a small portion of their capital, so while for us they are making huge bets this is nothing for them, the other option is that they are in fact addicted to gambling and they are mad they have lost so much money at the casino and now they want it back not understanding that attitude will only lead them to lose even more money.

I guess most of the times this will fall into the 4 different situations scenarios, with 2 that overlap

like:

a gambler that does it just to have fun
a gambler that does it for the money
an investor that invests to make more money
an investor that acts like a gambler.

some of the possibilities.

Suppose they relating their hobby like gambling to make a profit. In that case, I am afraid that can impact their business because if they have a big passion for gambling and in business simultaneously, one of that thing will not survive. I think the gambling side will become strong because he will see the opportunity to make money will be bigger from that side. That can ruin his business because he will spend more time gambling instead continue his business and make money.

I strongly agree with you mate, well I guess it is because the more people who used to engaged themselves more on gambing I've meet in life was those people who I know has no interest in market investment or even in business. But there are also those people I know who gamble but  also a business minded. They are relating their hobby like gambling to generate a profit and those people are great in their life.

this applies way more on skill games than pure luck ones
but even on pure luck games a gambler can think like an investor in terms of risk management and avoiding being ruined/loosing all their money, by limiting how much money they use for gambling

Unfortunately there is a lot of people that believe there is not really any kind of difference and that is why they treat the markets as if they were gambling and make no attempt at all to try to improve their strategy when they are trading the markets thinking everything is about luck when this could not be further from the truth, in the markets the ones that make the best profits are the ones that rely on their knowledge to take decisions and not the ones that rely on their luck.

Maybe they do not become interested in the investment so they only think about playing gambling and still want to win on the gambling games. Besides that, they think that if they invest their money, they will need a long time to receive the return and do not have the patience to wait. But if they can research more about the investment, they will see that the chance to profit will be bigger from the investment side than from playing gambling games.

That's true, but based on the high rollers of different gambling sites myself have asked the same question. Why these People aren't prioritising investment. We can understand it, only when we get into gambling hard. The instant return is the major factor, which we can't expect with investment. However investing from the profit of gambling is always a better perspective.

Things are totally different and cant really be collaborated in between gambling and investment.Both are separated on the concept of earning money neither sustainable or not for long term.

One is definitely for entertainment and one is totally for future income or profit and of course setting up those things are entirely different.Therefore, the way on dealing up with
it I depending on how a certain person would see it.

It should be separated depending into your own motive.

And this is because the markets are not really random, gambling is completely random in its nature, some people accuse casinos of rigging the results on their favour but believe me if there was some kind of pattern to what they did then people will always find a way to exploit those patterns, which by the way is precisely what we see with investing, people see a pattern in the behaviour of the markets and then they are able to exploit it and this is simply not possible with gambling which is what makes it so difficult to beat.

It is hard to see a gambler has an investor mindset as they want to make money. But not all of them will do like that because I am still sure that some of them will not just think about winning from the gambling games. If they can have an open mind about the investment thing, they will search for how they can have the investment while playing gambling.

How can a gambler have chances to suceed? Even with an investor's mindset it is not possible. You cant win against roulette with this kind of mindset, because it is mathematical impossible. Please explain your "idea" more further.

I agree with you but still, market investment isn't more dangerous but in overall, both of them are because people don't have self-control. If you can't control yourself, you can become alcoholic... There are a lot of examples that we can say if you lack self-control. And highest percentage of people lack self-control in market investment and gambling, that's the problem, not the actual product/services. When one loses, then he/she gets anxious and thinks in a bad way, their state of mind is very different from normal one and in this case they may do the things that they wouldn't do in normal cases.

There should be both of them legal or illegal, otherwise, it's just distinguished.

Not necessarily! Look at the guy who gambled on the subprime mortgage crisis back in 2004 - 2006 when he built his position. Not sure about the name, but he became super rich and back at the time bet against all odds. At least in the eyes of many other gurus.

Generally though you are right. Gambling leads to zero in the long run unless you thoroughly deal with risk reward ratios, but not many gamblers do that.

Well said though anyway!

the thing is: there's no fine line, gambling and investing are really different things and should be treated differently.

If a gambler has an investor mindset he can have chances to suceed.
but an investor with a gambler's mindset is faded to loose a lot.

Maybe if they can have one investment that can give them profit, that will make them realize that only investment helps them make money in some term instead of playing gambling. Actually, if they are often losing in the gambling game, they can see how big their chance to make money. If they think that gambling is not working for them to make money, they must leave it forever and never playing gambling. We should do if we want to change our lives better so we do not deal with gambling too often and only playing gambling in our spare time without using too big money.

Gambling is really should for the sake of entertainment but people do really go on the wrong path on having wrong views and perception that this one could really make them rich
but it doesnt really work that way and the time they do lost up money then thats the time they would make up some realizations that this isnt something can be compared with investment
or making themselves rich because gambling does have its own purpose which is really filling out that pleasure seeking of you than on making investment which is totally
inappropriate to have in mind.Always seek out for specific investment if you are really eager to deal with long term.