If you continue striving to improve your own comprehension capabilities, then you too will be able to fill that thimble. However, judging by some of your mindlessly incendiary posts, your journey will be a lengthy one. Therefore, I suggest you pace yourself.
Apologies Thunder. Bad use of a term I now realise I din't understand. Eating humble pie with a smile. Spelling is British English. As you can see from what I wrote it's clearly impossible for anything more than a very few to come out as winners, but using the term zero sum game, as you correctly pointed out, contradicts this view. Today I am older and wiser and richer.
No sweat. We've all made our share of gaffes here at ET, however not all of us have come clean. So you're ahead of the game. As an aside, I am familiar with British English. It was a typo that I latched onto. But it was just a tit-for-tat response on my part. Water under the bridge, eh?
In the long run we are all dead;but, that doesn't mean we can't experience some improving situations on the way. I am an amateur horse player and trader. If the take in horse betting were as low as the stock trading commissions I would easily be a horse betting winner. Picking horse bets is much easier than stocks. Both are easy to beat but you must severely restrict your participation to win at either. Unless you are as talented as most of the E.T. participants and can successfully day trade using high margin at high frequency you are broke in the long run.
Isn't this just semantics. There are two types of gambling - betting when you have no edge, and are doing it either for the thrill, or the hope of a big score; and betting when you have sized up the odds and think you have an edge. To call them both gambling, the same term, is rather misleading IMO. One of them is gambling in the sense that Joe Schmoe thinks of it. The other is speculation, trading, investment, professional handicapping etc. A skilled poker player at a table of fish is no more gambling than Wal-Mart are when they speculate on customer demand for a new store.
Oddly enough, there are parallels between horse racing and trading. In fact there have been funds that make made money in horse racing. Some one on ET must have an inside story or two they can share ...