everything in life is gambling if we define it by taking a calculated risk in everything we do, and we do that 100s of times per day without realizing it.
For example, every time you get into your car to drive somewhere, you are gambling that you won’t make a fatal mistake or that someone else won’t either. You are assessing the probabilities of that happened based on your personal driving skills and the fact that you are hoping that other drivers value their personal safety to the same degree that you do and will be careful.
Investing in a mutual fund is gambling because you are basing your decision on the fact that you have researched the fund, researched the managers, looked at their assets and track record, assess their tolerance for risk and then make an informed decision that the probabilities of success are worth the investment.
Day trading is no different in the respect that “informed” and “knowledgeable” traders, who understand what they are doing, are operating under a known and tested set of statistical probabilities. Those tested statistics are based on the rules that they use to decide when to take trades and how to manage them. If their statistics are a worthwhile risk, then they trade and then manage it appropriately.
Poker is very similar in the respect that experience and statistical probability can be used to give a player an edge to know when to play their hands, when to fold their hands and how to manage their bets (money management) based on their hand.
Everything is a risk in life and we are constantly assessing the weight of that risk to ourselves, and then acting accordingly. This is all gambling, which is weighing the risk of an unknown outcome. Every day trade has an unknown outcome. Every drive in the car has one as well. Investing in college education is a risk as well.
We assess the risk of failure in all of these situations based on the best information we have, and proceed because we believe we have a high probability of success.
When people ask the question about whether or not day trading or investing is just gambling, implies that we are standing on a bridge just throwing our money into the wind and hoping it comes back to us multiplied. The question assumes we have no idea what we are doing and just flip a coin or pull a handle on a slot machine. It’s a frustratingly naive question to ask, really.
And when I get that question and then ask, “well you took a risk driving to work today” people will rolls their eyes to that reply as if it has no bearing. But it does. It’s the same thing. Nothing is certain in life. Only a series of very calculated risks and if you want to call that gambling, then fine.