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Are You Trading or Gambling?

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Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#331

Post by glandium »

rootsofallevil wrote: post #47
vasco wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, insurance is a bet against yourself. When assessing insurance I always go through this exercise. For example, optional auto insurance when renting a car is routinely extremely overpriced. A good way to reason about it is "Would I bet $20/day that I'm going to have an accident in this car for the next 3 days?"

it would be more accurate to say: Would I bet $20/day that something will happen to this car that would make the rental car company want to be reimbursed for? Depending on rental car company the limits of scratches, dents etc .. can be very low.

And those scratches, dents, or even more could be entirely not your fault. Heck, they could even happen when you're not in the vehicle.

So effectively it's a bet against you, other people and more generally the world.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#332

Post by benibela »

jw1224 wrote: post #211
hourislate wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe "Market Wizards - Jack D. Schwager" highlights this. When speaking with some of the best and most successful traders in the markets, he found that the one common thing between them was "Game Perspective". They understood human emotion and had this desire to be the best at the game. The money/wealth was not the focus but the reward. If I remember correctly (read the book a couple of decades ago), most did no…

I’m a terrible trader, and had no shame in admitting it. The moment I saw red, I panicked and sold. If I had open orders on the market, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I found trading to be all-consuming, exhausting, and completely demoralising. But I also couldn’t bear to just let my hard-earned savings sit there, wasting away. A cup of coffee cost more than I was earning in annual interest! About 3 months…

Are you going to make it open-source?

I need something like that. I started trading this month, and the first thing I did was putting $1000 on AMC shares which then lost half their value :/

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#333

Post by Bilal_io »

nikanj wrote: post #167
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…

Transaction costs for sending bitcoin are massively larger than sending paypal.

You're thinking is limited to your experience only.

PayPal charges a big percentage to send money to friends overseas. 3.9% + $0.3 in my experience, some countries may be higher, how is that lower than Bitcoin's fees?

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#334

Post by pashamur »

anaphor wrote: post #283
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.

Why has the S&P 500, Russell 2k, etc all gone up over the past 20 years on average then?

1) 20 years is a small sample size

2) The US has enjoyed the status of the world's reserve currency since 1945, which literally means the gains of the U.S. stock market are partly financed by the whole world (note that we used to have a net surplus with other countries pre-1970, but now run a deep deficit and have off-shored our domestic manufacturing base - as a result of needing to get dollars out into the system)

3) Most stock market analyses on the US stock market are done in this 1945-now period when the US has been dominant on the world stage; it's a long time in an individual's life but a short time historically. If that changes, I expect lots of things that were "always true" to no longer be true anymore.

More reading: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#335

Post by lend000 »

Most people making active trades right now are certainly gambling, but has society really left them much choice? They can't leave their house, and boring investments are significantly underperforming because the government has committed to low bond rates and printing enough money to dissolve your mattress savings and prop up equities at all costs. Add that real estate is insanely expensive (also a consequence of artificially low interest rates), and it shouldn't be so difficult to imagine why even intelligent people are playing the short term trading game which is approximately zero sum. It seems like the only way to get ahead, and it kind of is true (even though most will fall further behind).

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#336

Post by gerritsg »

MajorSauce wrote: post #289
jw1224 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a terrible trader, and had no shame in admitting it. The moment I saw red, I panicked and sold. If I had open orders on the market, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I found trading to be all-consuming, exhausting, and completely demoralising. But I also couldn’t bear to just let my hard-earned savings sit there, wasting away. A cup of coffee cost more than I was earning in annual interest! About 3 months…

I recently made a bot to find profitable cryptocurrency pairs loops and while most exchanges already have dozens of users doing exactly the same thing (if the exchange itself is not doing it), I really liked the motivation it gave me to start a new coding project in a language I did not touch for some time (C#) instead of my traditional python approach. You post just inspired me to make something similar (whether sto…

Are you having much success with it? What platform are you using? I've wanted to do something similar in Rust.

Or if your bot is just _finding_ the pairs now but not trading, is there a platform you plan to use?

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#337

Post by ajmadesc »

throw0101a wrote: post #228
elygre wrote: post #13

Around 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to listen to a member of Nasdaq top management talk about the stock market. It's all a _tiny_ bit blurry, being a long time ago, but I remember how he talked about three different perspectives for investing in stock: First, the "company perspective". An investor would buy stock in a company they believed in. Maybe they had good products, or good management, or something else…

> Second, the "stock perspective". An investor would ignore the underlying company, but look at the stock itself. It didn't really matter if the company was doing good, but only if the stock itself had good potential. […] > Finally, the "game perspective". An investor would not really care about the stock, but only about the behavior of other investors. Well, momentum investing does give good returns over the market…

I think you can do even better if you reduce the intervals

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#338

Post by mcguire »

px43 wrote: post #148
nikanj wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thus, bitcoin. A stock that's guaranteed to provide no dividends, do no buy-backs, or deliver any value - aside from the ability to sell it to the next fool for an even greater value.

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…

...at 4 transactions per second and $20 / transaction. Assuming nothing interferes to drop the hash rate; in China, transactions have been banned although mining is still legal.

Re: Are You Trading or Gambling?

#340

Post by tharkun__ »

albntomat0 wrote: post #327
8note wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Bitcoin continue to have transactions once that limit is met? Arent the miners executing transactions in exchange for Bitcoin? When there's no more coins to mine, there's no reason for anyone to be running their bitcoin operations. It'll fall to governments? At that point, can't they introduce more Bitcoin?

Each transactions has a fee value set by the sender, that goes to the miner. Miners select the top N transactions by fee, so miners will still have an incentive.

The fees are already exorbitant and make no sense if you wanted to use Bitcoin for everyday transactions. You still see merchants that have something like a 2$ minimum for credit card transactions, which charge a percentage fee usually.

Looking at https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... the average Bitcoin fee seems to be somewhere around $22 right now. Just think of the dialog occurring once miners have to make all their money from fees only:

"Yes sir, I would like to buy this chewing gum for my son. Yes I know it costs $0.50. Yes I know it will cost me the equivalent fee of $50 to buy it using Bitcoin. Now sell it to me already!".

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