By extension, everything in life is uncertain to a varying degree and everything in life is usually short carry (you have to pay to eat, last time I checked). So, using your definition, everything is a gamble. Does "knowing" that your current activity is a gamble help you at all? Probably not.
Enron's stock went down and stayed down. GM's stock went down and stayed down. So did the stock of Bear sterns, Lehman Brothers, Pacific Gas & Electric, Thornburg Mortgage, Chrysler, MF Global, Refco, Conseco, CIT Group, WorldCom, Washington Mutual, and American Airlines (several times) and hundreds, hundreds, of other publically traded companies. I am not the one who is confused. You wish to tie the concept of "control" and "lack of control" to gambling." You cannot do so and stay in the discussion because the term "Gambling" has nothing to do with control. It is simply wagering something of value on an uncertain outcome. Of course, since the outcome is uncertain, you do not control it, otherwise it would be a certain outcome. Your problem, as clearly evidenced in your version of the way way the stock market works, (which for you is a stock market full of "certainties,") is that you truly do not understand risk other than in binary terms - to you something is either a complete risk with a 100% chance of failure or it is somehow completely risk-free with a 100% chance of success. There you go again. Gambling is about wagering on the inherent uncertainty in the world, whether the outcome of a stock offering, the turn of card, the roll of the dice, a sporting event, a presidential election, the price of crude oil in May 2014.
This thread is why I avoid talking to any non-professional traders. It inevitably ends up into a huge debate over semantics, metaphysical, philosophy, etc. because they have nothing else to talk about. No profits, no ideas, no clue, no substance.
At least one professional trader contributed an interesting idea to this, admittedly, worthless in general thread. Either you have something to say or your post goes to junk like many in this thread. Looking up "gambling" in wikipedia I came across this: Evolutionary psychology suggests that women more than men tend to select mating partners based on their resources. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective men may have had more to gain from a large increase in resources than women have had, which may be one explanation for why men, and especially poor men, tend to gamble more than women. All explained now lol
Life is inherently probabalistic. We live in a world in which nearly all outcomes have some degree of uncertainty. It does not become a gamble until we lay or offer odds. i.e. until we place a bet. Purchasing a product for consumption is not the same as placing a bet. Knowing your current activity has an element of uncertainty with respect to its outcome may not be enough to alter your behavior in most cases. Over the course of one's entire lifetime, for example, there is a 1 in 84 chance of being killed in a car accident. Is that going to prevent anyone other than Ralph Nader from owning an automobile? Probably not. However, it just might be the difference between you choosing to ride Enron stock to zero as it collapses into bankruptcy, thinking that "no stock goes down forever," or bailing with profits intact as it smashes through one of many would-be should-be support levels on the way down. You see, once you accept the uncertainty inherent in the act of making bets in the financial markets, you can then get on with the business of measuring that uncertainty. You cannot control the event, but you can control your risk. If you can quantify your risk, you can then size your bets so that over time you maximize your reward while assuring that you never go broke. And so long as you don't lose all your chips, you will always be able to get back in the game.
Friend, if you are not interested in what we have to say here, and if you have so much in your life that is better and more choiceworthy than what we are discussing here, why are you drawn to us so? Why can you not just let us be? For what it is worth, I posted, in real time, two trades in this thread, both profitable. So at least give me credit for doing something that you and the other supposedly "professional" traders here at ET rarely if ever do - I do in fact trade. I have done nothing here to insult you, and yet you came here to this thread the daay after my first posted trade, and you delighted in "congratulating" me for a "loss," when in fact the trade I posted, with charts showing entry, stop loss, etc., was clearly profitable. Such an elementary error on your part, I suppose, was merely a temporary lapse in your professionalism, correct? Perhaps it was made due to your zeal to delight in the failure of others? My humble suggestion to you is to place me on your ignore list, so that you may no longer be troubled by the posts of this intellectually barren amateur.
Great question. Here's the answer, ET spams my email everytime someone replies. I need to turn this off.