Re:Are You Trading or Gambling?
by sweetheart on Saturday February 27, 2021 @07:14AM
(#26284349)
Day trading is difficult and requires a lot of practice, knowledge, and patience, but saying you’ll lose every time isn’t always true. There are many many profitable retail day traders. HFT don’t really compete too much because they look to scalp differently.
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A three to five percent success rate applied to a large population will produce "many many" winners. This is true.
Re:Are You Trading or Gambling?
by bidirectional on Saturday February 27, 2021 @07:57AM
(#26284571)
You can apply the same logic to suggest no one should start a business.
That would be appropriate advice for a large slice of the population, so I don't see the problem there.
Business is a field where we know for sure that being better at it increases your chances to the point where your expected profit is positive.
Individual day trading is less clear. Sure, you can get better at it to increase your odds but it seems like that isn’t enough to make those skilled people in aggregate make money.
The analogy in a casino is that perfect play means you’ll do better but there’s still house advantage and so on average perfect players will still lose money.
Yes, if it's business is day trading. The success rates of other kinds of businesses vary.
And you have to be able to correlate their success rate with some measure of skill or else you’re basically saying that not everyone loses the lottery.
The claim to prove is that having some level of knowledge or skill makes the expected gains of day trading positive.