this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that's not how most traders behave, and it's not how most traders' payoffs work.
Excellent analogy. People who equate the stock market and gambling should go look up where the DJIA stood in October 1994. The slot machines in Vegas don't magically start spitting out profit just because you're patient, but stocks generally do over time.
It is gambling, because dark pools. That is the house. You're not trading the actual stock. The financial institutions do that. You buy stock from them, and they in turn give you a fake number and invest it in all secrecy.
In essence, you'll get your money, but they will handle the profits. So it is a rigged slot machine.
Please go look up the Dow as of October 1994.
Thank you.
No.
Please read my original post again. Did I say "was and always has been" or did I say "is"?
Not all gambling requires a casino/house.
Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.
(The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)
Yes, general investing is not zero sum, however many methods of advanced trading are. Options trading, which is prominent and easy to access on Robinhood, is much closer to gambling (and is treated that way by many users) and is zero sum.
Most active trading strategies require successfully arbitraging, or extracting inefficiencies out of the market, and you can't do either of those things without someone else losing money.
Passive investment is investing in the companies that underlay the market, active trading is extracting value out of the market itself.
the end result is very much the same
Damn, I’m up over 100% since I downloaded it seven years ago. Thank you, ETFs and tech companies I dig!
Nice story, bro.
I'm also up, more years, not Robinhood.
Then you glance over to Wallstreet Bets, they are the direct opposite on the curve.
Yet still almost everyone loses money on exchanges, for various reasons which I don't want to spend time writing up.
But market has been irrational for many years, with no signals of slowing down.
I mean, I feel most people who lost money were doing "options trading", basically full on gambling/speculation. If you had put that money in an s&p500 index fund, chances of losing money are slim.
Thats... what Robinhood doesn't advertise, and (at least used to) always buys options by default.
So fuck Robinhood.
Where is the app that has only one button 'Buy ESG'?
Same, looks like I'm not part of that 90% either, only 4 years account age here.
Heady!