Quote from: SmartCharpa on Today at 02:10:40 PM

Quote from: Dzwaafu11 on August 19, 2024, 06:00:21 PM

Trading becomes gambling when someone who trades does not have knowledge about it and keeps on losing money. That means he is gambling with his money, but some people confidently compare these two things together, and I think they are not the same. However, the practices that can lead trading to gambling is when a trader keeps losing money and refuses to find a way to sort his problem out because when you lose too much and you are not making money out trading, that is gambling.

Well, I believe that those who compare trading to gambling lack knowledge of crypto trading, because if they did, they would not compare it to gambling. Those who compare trading with gambling, in my opinion, are those who invest for the short term, otherwise, I do not believe people who have held for a long time would compare trading to gambling. However, I'm wondering how some people compare this because no one can predict the price of Bitcoin, and no one can suggest what the Bitcoin price will be in the future, whereas anyone can predict the outcome of a game or any other gambling they risk their money on.

You hardly make any sense. Trading is closer to gambling than investing.

In bitcoin, investing should be 4 years or more, and preferably 4-10 years or more, otherwise, if the investment is less than 4 years, then it is more like trading rather than investing because it is an attempt to catch the cyclic price wave.

There can be more conservative forms of trading that would be less like gambling, yet if we appreciate gambling to be more on the spectrum of a game of chance and/luck rather than a game of skill, so surely there are some traders who have more skills than others and those who are employing more skills in their trading would be gambling less than those who are not employing as many skills.

A person could come into bitcoin with a trading intention, so for example, let's say that one year ago in late August 2023, such trader came into bitcoin and the BTC price was bouncing between $25k and $27k, so he decides that he is going to buy $2.6k worth of bitcoin and hold until the BTC price is at least 30% higher and then when the BTC price drops back down 10% he will buy back, so if he buys at $26k (0.1BTC) and then he ends up selling at $35k (receiving $3.5k minus fees), and so then the BTC price does not drop and it keeps going up so such trader has to figure out the terms of his next trade... and yeah maybe he is not exactly gambling, and if the BTC price would have had gone down rather than up, he could have had a plan to either hold until the BTC price returns back up or to hold it until it goes to zero or alternatively he could have had employed some kind of a stop loss point (since he might want to keep his capital working)..

The styles of traders can vary, and some are more gambling oriented than others, and perhaps the ones using more skill are not gambling as much as the ones using fewer skills, but even the one who are using more skills in their trading will likely recognize the gambling aspects of their trading (rather than denying it), especially if they are genuine rather than just trying to spin the supposed lack of risk of what they are doing... and another aspect is if the trader were to be using leverage that brings even more complications and more risks that may or may not end up in classifying what they are doing as a kind of gambling, even though they might still call such practices as trading, too.. which sure they might be using a lot of skills and maybe even setting up their leverage trades in both directions so that less luck is involved and more skill is involved.

Let's take a financially similarly situated, investor... He also has $2.6k that he can invest into bitcoin at $26k-ish, but he also has a plan to invest 4-10 years or longer (he might even be thinking -20-30 years or more of investing into bitcoin, but he is starting with at least an idea of 4-10 years or longer), so he plans to start out with his $2.6k as a lump sum buy and then after that to buy $100 of bitcoin per week for about the next 4 years and then reassess his situation from time to time to see if he might want to increase or decrease his DCA amounts or other ways that he might buy BTC to keep accumulating. He might also know that about 2-3 times a year he tends to get a bonus (or other extra cashflow that might end up being anywhere between $1,500 and $3k, and so he considers that he might put some or all of his bonus into bitcoin, just depending on where the rest of his finances are at the time that he gets each of the bonuses.

The longer term investor is still taking chances because bitcoin could end up going to zero, yet he is still mostly staying focused on buying and accumulating bitcoin, and sure down the road he might conclude that he has enough bitcoin and start to sell it or even to sell all of it, yet he is still making fewer entrances and exits that the trader, and seems way less inclined to fit the gambling label as compared to the trader who may or may not have as many guidelines in terms of how to reach his various goals along the way.

We can still proclaim that the investor is still gambling on a proposition that the BTC price will tend to go up in the longer term, yet it only makes a bit of sense that the guy who has the longer term approach is less incline to fit into the category as a gambler as compared to the trader who may or may not be taking chances or even going down slippery slopes to be more and more greedy with his trades, so even if traders may have had started out conservative they might become more adventurous in their journey, and if they don't lose all their money, they might even make a lot of mistakes along the way and decide to become more conservative so then maybe gravitating towards being less of a gambler in the way that they execute their trades. and so they might even figure out how to be an investor, even though sometimes traders will have difficulties creating longer term plans like the investor because they might presume that they have to keep their capital working so there are frequently more and more slippery slope possibilities that the trader will fall into some gambling practices, whether they admit it (or like such label) or not.