Well, apparently, Wikipedia defines: Gambling is the wagering of money or something of value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning money or material goods To invest is to allocate money (or sometimes another resource, such as time) in the expectation of some benefit in the future Sounds pretty similar to me
Definitions of Gambling: 1. Play games of chance for money; bet. 2. Take risky action in the hope of a desired result. There is nothing wrong with gambling per se. What is wrong is risking money when the odds are not in your favor. Many years ago when I was in college, I had a hallmate who got in legal trouble (drunk driving) and needed to raise $2,000 in a hurry to hire a lawyer. He asked me to borrow $200 so he couple make a bet on horse racing to raise the money. I told him that gambling to raise the money was a crazy idea. Well it turned out that during the summers he worked as an exercise rider for horses and did in fact know people in the industry. So I loaned him the $200 and gave him another $100 to bet for me. The horse came in next to last. I was furious, but he told me that word had gotten out beforehand, and driven down the payoff odds, so that the trainer told the jockey not to try to win. The next week my friend came back and asked to borrow another $200 to place on the same horse, because his friends assured him that the horse was ready to win. I loaned him the $200, but this time no bet for me. The horse won going away. My friend paid be back the $400 total, but I lost out on a big payday by not having a bet this time. I learned two valuable lessons. 1) Never bet serious money on horses, since a lot of it is rigged; 2) Only risk money when the odds are in your favor, whether by probability, insider information, historical data, arbitage, etc.
LOL. My first lesson in arbitrage, risk and risk management was based on gambling. To make the long story short, back in college I tried to arb two football bookies (different dormitories) against each other only to have one of them default when I tried to close the arb.
I think the term gambling has a natural association with playing a game of chance where skill is not the primary determinant of the outcome and has a negative expectation. ...most people think of casino games and most would say the casino visitors are gamblers, yet they don't call the house gamblers, instead they are running a business. Expectation is the differentiator. ...but this is all semantics, not gambling or trading
This forum post made me recall a recent Vegas documentary I just watched: The Player: Secrets of a Vegas Whale (2014) It's a good documentary...talks about blackjack, casinos, whales, 2008 housing crisis, wall st, trading, odds, strategy, etc, etc, There's a few parallels you can make between trading and Don Johnson's blackjack success story,
hope is always a factor, the difference between the professional and amateur: one has hope and the method with probabilities in his favor , the other one just has hope... but both hope to win making risk bets
Hope is similar to faith, in that many people mistake belief for faith. Faith doesn't require any belief. It is in fact lessened by limited beliefs, or so-called facts. In its core faith is about that inner conviction to persevere and trust in something bigger than oneself, even when it's just mutual trust. Hope also has a core of truth, and is indeed almost the same as faith. Hope is that inner strength where no matter how bleak and dark it gets, one remembers that after rain comes sun. So it is both a kind of faith in that events tend to turn around, but also from experience, some wider perspective of having lived through many such cycles already. Faith and hope can both be a source of integrity (honesty), willpower (determination) and strength (value). However, when faith becomes limited by beliefs or hope becomes limited by dependency and helplessness, they may by mistake become a source of weakness as well. The difference is Knowledge, and applying it in day to day life.