Everything in life involves some sort of risk, but doesn't mean it's gambling. Gambling is defined exactly by those two properties. You could die driving to the store, but the odds are tiny and the benefits are huge. Driving to the store isn't gambling. Are casinos gambling when they let you play blackjack? No, the bets are +EV, even those they are only a few % different than the player odds.
You say poker players are gambling and then say gambling is taking a high risk bet. Good poker players make positive expected value bets, and have correct bet sizing (via Kelly Criterion) that means they will be able to survive variance and win.
Poker is definitely gambling. Casinos are gambling, they’re just doing so with massive volume and tiny risk (afaik). Trading is gambling. Gambling well is a subset of gambling.
I think we have the same concept, but I'd be happy to call trading gambling if playing poker table games was called gambooooling.
This statement seems uncontroversial, but I am not sure it is true.
Driving to the store is one of the riskiest activities I (used to) regularly engage in. Now that I do it (much) less, I do indeed perform a risk/reward analysis of getting into a car (when before it was automatic, with an assumed zero risk due to normalcy bias).
It is possible that under a strict definition we are indeed gambling with our lives each time we get in an automobile.
Where you could in theory apply the Kelly criterion is in selecting which stakes to play at. But in practice it seems more chosen through rules of thumb / common sense / feeling than an actual application of the Kelly criterion.
The common sentiments are “I’m only investing what I can afford to lose” and “but what if this is the next GameStop/Bitcoin?” They’re entering with a mindset that betting it all is fine because they’ve mentally written off the money.
I’ve been using this as an opportunity to introduce friends and family to more passive, long-term investment strategies but the skepticism is strong.
Lots of generalizations there, but if it's true that millennials have more difficulty embracing delayed gratification, which I think is likely, then a riskier more speculative investment strategy seems to naturally follow from that.
It might also be additionally influenced by record poor returns from safer types of investments.
To be clear, I'm allowed to pick on millennials because I am one, and I've been burned bad this last week on my speculative "investments". So it applies to me as well.
understanding that the distinction between “gambling” and “this other respected thing” is purely cultural is even more important
you are facing people, around the world, who do not need to rationalize a difference for any cultural, personal, religious, legal or future legal reason. even their community does not care
yet you do, you are already disadvantaged by spending any cycles on this
This all hinges on how we define "gambling". A lot of top poker pros do not subscribe to the definition that includes them as gamblers, since colloquially "gambling" isn't always synonymous with the game itself but instead connotes reckless abandon and negative EV decision making.
I suspect a better definition would be a wager based on random chance. Markets aren't "random", they are just suitibly complex enough to seem like it. Some people apply algorithms and emotional analysis to predict behavior. This might sound like poker, but I would argue all of the influences in a market are clearly visible. In a game of chance like poker, card ordering is still random (yes you have probability of predicting next card, but you can't see it until it happens).
What people mean when they say that something is random on a non-quantum scale is this: the process is so complicated and hard to predict that our best models of the process incorporate a significant amount of randomness.
This is the case for markets too, where a multifractal random walk is about the best model we have.