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Are You Trading or Gambling?

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Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#191

Post by krapp »

NOTaCODERR wrote: post #61
DSingularity wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GameStop price spiked because of a short squeeze. Short squeeze happened because hedgefunds over extended in their short positions. Do you think GameStop was shorted more than float because of games learned by cryptocurrency traders? That’s a stretch.

It’s really interesting seeing how HN can be so uninformed when the topic changes to their area of expertise, this thread is insightful and I’ll use the search button to get an understanding of how many morons are on this forum, this is great for me as I’m not a coder and thought this crowd was ‘smart’.

I don't know why Hacker News has a reputation for particularly high intelligence or technical expertise relative to other forums with similar interests. It's not as if anyone had to submit their CV and reverse a linked list on a whiteboard to join.

Unless you can independently verify someone's credentials and area of expertise, it's safe to assume they don't know what they're talking about. I've seen it happen too often that someone will make a claim in absolute confidence only to be corrected by an actual expert in the field, usually the person who invented the technology/language/algorithm being discussed. If that happens with technical discussion, imagine how wrong HN can be about everything else.

Sturgeon's Law always applies. The people most worth reading and talking to here also tend to who post the least, the more confident someone is, the more likely it is they simply can't fathom the depths of their own ignorance.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#192

Post by thebigspacefuck »

randomsearch wrote: post #163
px43 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this whole "bitcoin is pointles" meme gets upchuckles on hacker news all day long, but at this point it's pretty embarrassing that this level of ignorance continues to persist. As it turns out "sending money over the internet" is kind of an important utility for the modern world, and nothing does it as well as Bitcoin. This is why it's now a trillion dollar global economy. That's great for you that you're in a…

I’m undecided on Bitcoin. Happy to be called ignorant, but only if you can explain why. There are many ways of transferring money across the internet. Why is Bitcoin special if that’s the reason for its value? Genuinely want to be won over.

You can buy drugs or a hitman online without being traced.

Also ransomware can demand payment in Bitcoin without being traced.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#193

Post by ip26 »

lordnacho wrote: post #31

This is only scratching the surface of the question. For interest, there's a very common negative expected value bet that almost everyone is required to make: insurance. We don't consider that gambling, in fact we often tell our parents to buy some when they fly on holiday. Why? The answer touches on the lottery. We care about not just the average case, we care about what might happen. Regarding Kelly criterion, ther…

If you assume a well-functioning insurance market, I think the argument can be made that the negative expected value should however be very small. Then going one step further, I think mitigating downside potential is actually the opposite of gambling. Driving without insurance is gambling.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#194

Post by whatever1 »

Trading stocks in America is state sponsored gambling. All of the game is based on the assumption that the stocks will (on average) always go up. They dont. Check the European stock markets that have been stagnant for 20 years.

Selling lottery tickets with the promise of getting a pension. Disgusting.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#195

Post by cambalache »

> A not so obvious result that follows from making successive negative expected value bets, is that in the long run you are guaranteed to lose all your money (or ruin). Intuitively this makes sense as with each bet, you are losing money on average.

And this was upvoted all the way to the top. JC this site quality is at all-time low.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#197

Post by olalonde »

randomsearch wrote: post #163
px43 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this whole "bitcoin is pointles" meme gets upchuckles on hacker news all day long, but at this point it's pretty embarrassing that this level of ignorance continues to persist. As it turns out "sending money over the internet" is kind of an important utility for the modern world, and nothing does it as well as Bitcoin. This is why it's now a trillion dollar global economy. That's great for you that you're in a…

I’m undecided on Bitcoin. Happy to be called ignorant, but only if you can explain why. There are many ways of transferring money across the internet. Why is Bitcoin special if that’s the reason for its value? Genuinely want to be won over.

> There are many ways of transferring money across the internet.

Only through a centralized intermediary (e.g. PayPal), which may block the transfer, freeze funds, deny access, go bankrupt, etc. Bitcoin allows direct peer-to-peer money transfers (a bit like cash but digital).

> Why is Bitcoin special if that’s the reason for its value?

Personally, I feel that the censorship resistant and pseudonymous p2p money transfer is a nice feature but the killer feature is that it's a money that can't be manipulated by any one entity. Its rules are pretty much set in stone. Since it is politically neutral, it is well suited for becoming an internationally accepted store of value / currency.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#198

Post by Double_Cast »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #38
agumonkey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I believe they orbit around the set of self fulfilling prophecies described in books. Fibonacci or similar simple arithmetic range estimates, deviation from the mean, etc.

Isn't this the reverse of a self-fulfilling prophecy? A self-fulfilling prophecy attracts reality to the state it describes. The stock market, being anti-inductive, attracts reality away from whatever predictions being made - that is, for example, if I found a pattern that proves $GME reaches the Moon on Tuesday, enough other people would find that pattern too and start buying early, and $GME would reach the Moon on…

Bubbles are inductive. Arbitrage is anti-inductive.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#199

Post by MereInterest »

rtheunissen wrote: post #188
YokoZar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An investor would not really care about the stock, but only about the behavior of other investors. This sounds like the idea of a Keynesian Beauty Contest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest ) "It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third deg…

This is also how I've experienced primary elections in the US: people voting for who they think other people will vote for.

Very true, and this is in large part a function of the voting system in the US. Suppose you are choosing between primary candidates A and B, who will run against C. You'd prefer A over B, but B has wider appeal in the general election.

A better system would be a voting system that doesn't split the vote, because then you could forgo the primaries altogether. Have A, B, and C all run against each other directly. This is impossible with today's first past the post system, because that would immediately hand the election to C.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#200

Post by pensatoio »

whatever1 wrote: post #194

Trading stocks in America is state sponsored gambling. All of the game is based on the assumption that the stocks will (on average) always go up. They dont. Check the European stock markets that have been stagnant for 20 years. Selling lottery tickets with the promise of getting a pension. Disgusting.

GPD per capita is significantly stronger in the USA than the EU. Over the past forty years, growth in the USA has been not only been strong, but stable (practically linear.) The EU is a very different story.

My point is, I don’t think it’s fair to justify calling the US equity markets “gambling” by comparing them to the EU which is a totally different horse.

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