I don't need stock trading prowess for self-validation. I'm in it for the money, and nothing else. If I can't make money in this game, then it's time for me to find something that I can make money on. I don't derive any notions of personal honor from being able to trade profitably, so if I'm unable to trade profitably, I feel no sense of disgrace from that fact. I've recently (I'm mean really recently, this last week) taken an interest in online casinos, as a result of reading a thread on Elite Trader (about Poker and trading). I never would otherwise have even given any online casino sites the dignity of looking at them, my suspicion was that they were all a crooked racket. No, not me to dabble in the sleazy world of manipulated sucker games. I was going to make money the smart way. I was going to increase my financial stakes playing the legitimate world of stocks. Well my observations are rapidly changing my opinions. I still have some misgivings about the legitimacy of the gambling programs, because I know that software can be designed to make game programs act any way someone wants. But I'm growing to think that most online casino programs are basically legitimate. The odds are stacked in their favor, but by the parameters of the games themselves, not by deceptive programming of the game software. Presuming that these games are not rigged, what I am finding is that my chances of making money on them are a lot better than my chances of making money on the stock market. And this observation is making me rethink my attitudes about the stock market. I'm growing to believe that the title of this thread is in fact quite accurate. I think that with a moderate amount of applied intelligence, a person can make money on online casinos (provided of course that these sites really will credit you with the payouts, and not block your access if you start becoming too profitable). The stock market, however, has been compared to a poker game, not because of the similarity of the card game itself, but because of the similarity of the relations between the players during the game. The psychological aspect, trying to guess when the other player is merely bluffing, causing you to raise your stakes. Getting you to raise your bid for nothing, so they can grab your cash, because you were enough of a sucker to fall for their game. The stock market is just as much of a sucker game as most other forms of gambling. Only more so, because it purports to be a legitimate arena, rather than gambling, when in fact it is just the biggest casino going. If I can make more money at online casinos than I can with online trading, then for myself trading stocks is more of a sucker game.