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Trade Like A Casino, Not A Gambler

  
  Education
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Trade Like a Casino: Find Your Edge, Manage Risk, and Win Like the House

Any quick drive through Las Vegas makes it pretty clear who is rolling in the money – the Casinos! Why do gamblers keep going back despite losing most of the time?  Misplaced hope, fantasies about the big win, promising themselves they will walk away when they are up and still winning, and probably the inability to calculate probabilities. These symptoms may sound familiar to new traders who have lost money in the stock market, especially when we were new to trading and had delusions of grandeur about trading theirway to prosperity quickly and easily.

In gambling there are really only two sides to choose to be on, either you are a gambler or you are the house. The gamblers have the long term odds stacked against them. The more they gamble, the more the odds are that they will inevitably lose. The casino has stacked the odds on their side over the  long haul. The more the gambler keeps gambling, the more the odds shift in favor of the casino operator. The more they gamble the greater the chance the gambler will leave empty-handed.

The book featured in this blog post explains the winning principles of trading by using the casino paradigm. Profitable traders operate like casinos, with the odds in their favor over the long term. They have learned to trade with historically, back-tested trading systems that put the odds on their side. Much like casino operators, they risk small amounts of equity per trade (around 1% – 2% of their accounts), so no one trade can hurt them financially and mentally for that matter.

Most unseasoned traders behave like gamblers, with no real advantage. They plunge large bets on stocks so haphazardly that they just have a 50-50 shot like a roulette wheel – red or black. Many times these traders hurt themselves even worse by buying into the market in a downtrend and shorting into a rally,  believing that they can pick the bottom or top. Some new traders would love to have a 50/50 win ratio, many actually to all the wrong things and are no where near a 50% win rate. (more…)

The Difference Between Gamblers and Traders

  
  Education
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Yes, the vast majority of traders are gamblers, maybe the majority of market participants are in fact gamblers. The traders that are gamblers trade with no plan and without understanding the odds are stacked against them. Whether it is buying far out of the money options with no method for profitability or randomly chasing stocks on a whim, gambling is when you risk money with the odds against you and have no edge. The losses of the gamblers is where the majority of the profits come from to the winning traders in the markets who have an edge.

Now the other side is the traders that consistently win by using an edge that gives them an advantage over the other traders. The winning traders are not trading against the casino they are trading against the gamblers. They have become the casino, like the casino they know the odds are in their favor and they will be profitable in the long run. Like the casino has table limits they have risk management to not over expose themselves to any one bet by the gamblers. The biggest problem that gamblers have is their emotions that cause them to always lose in the long term by placing bets based on feelings instead of the odds. The winning traders trade based on probabilities being in their favor and pick their trades carefully based on the best chances of success.

The casinos are built from the losses of the gamblers, the winning traders accounts are built on the gambling of the traders with no plan, no edge, and no risk management.

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