How different is trading from just gambling? I know there seems to be a big difference with technical analysis and whatnot, but in the end aren't you just betting on something completely random?
When you gamble and lose you lose your money. It's gone. When you trade you always have something. Price may rise or fall but you have something.
Or it may not rise, and then you are left with the same, i.e. nothing ("holding the bag filled with shit")
Fundamentally, it is still six of one and half a dozen of the other. If you don't stake all, you will always "have something" left and can win back what you lost (at least, hypothetically). On the other hand, if the price doesn't revert, your losses are no less permanent than in gambling (the difference between your entry and exit points, obviously). Just in case, I'm not promoting gambling, I'm just telling how things actually stand in respect to trading. How they stand in respect to gambling, everyone should understand on their own
You are right if the price goes down and never up it's totally waste of money and time. But why you think only negative. At this situation the price will never go down like hell this is sure. So holding coins for a long time is always profitable. So the risk is common, if you do not take risk, you can not do so any work. In that, we have to choose less risk job to make money. Trading and Gambling in this trading is less risk job. So we can do trading to earn some extra money.