Trading is quite similar to gambling in some form of way, as you need to predict how will the price of bitcoin goes once you decided to purchase it at a certain price. Obviously in trading, you won't lose your money as fast as gambling as you can choose to hold your bitcoin in your account until the price rise to the amount which you feel comfortable to sell it away.
That is correct, after you bought bitcoin or any other altcoin in that matter, you are not still losing when the price is going down unless you sell them. But when you just keep on holding it or better yet, make a sell order targeting a certain amount of gain and forget about it, you have more chances of profiting this way than constantly checking the chart and your emotion sets in.