Betting is pure gamble . Its full with uncertainties and you can lose all and everything. Trading with the right technique and knowledge will profit you both on short and long term
well, if you compare the two, maybe trading is still better, because you can control 100% of the funds you have. however, for now, I don't recommend both, especially if you're new to this. it's better to look for information, and see the market situation directly, it might give you a wise choice, because $ 2k is quite a lot.
The chances of making money with either of those methods are very low especially if you have no experience with either one, so before using our money to trade or to gamble it is better to take our time and study which one of those options could give us more profits and then dedicate our time to make a deep research about that topic and only then we could proceed to use our money to try to generate profits.