[tongni]

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you seem smart, but this is a tremendously foolish statement.

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When you're young, it's all about earned income, not unearned income. Hoping to earn another 3-4% with even slight risk is not really worth the time and effort when you don't really have a ton of money.

Consider this: You are a young kid with 500k. You can invest in tbills for 3%, or you know of a place where you can invest at 6% with no risk, but a decent amount of work involved. How much can you really invest? 300k? Probably a little less, especially if you are playing high limits. That means you made 9000 dollars for your time. That might be 2 days of poker playing to someone who plays at the 100/200 level or 25/50 NL level regularly.

Also, there is some risk involved. So the chance you could have a downswing in both and then suddenly feel very, very uncomfortable playing at your usual limits or that the combination of the two factors could tilt you is not worth the return in my opinon. There's a lot of value in reduced variance, as well as avoiding the hassle of dealing with that stuff, especially when your hourly rate can be astronomical.

I'm very cautious by nature (I usually have at least 1000 BB's for whatever limit I play) and it would pain me to have to pass up a really good game just because I was dicking around with stocks and didn't feel comfortable.

Personally, I keep most of my money in 3 month treasury bills and the rest as a bankroll, but I'm lucky in that if I run bad I can barrow whatever I need until they roll over.

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even if you're playing $500/$1000, a million dollars is 1000BB. why would you need to have more than 500BB immediately accessible? even in this extreme case, it's stupid not to put at least half that money to work for you. and if that 500BB somehow isn't enough, you can keep it in liquid investments that you can get onto the poker sites within a few days if necessary.

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Well, as you get more and more money the utility of investing increases, of course. When you have 1 million, it's worth it to invest. But my original post was not trying to dissuade people with 950k to invest, but rather those guys with like 100k who are putting half their money in stocks and not playing higher like they should. I'm reasonably sure (I might be wrong) that there's no one under 25 that posts here with more than a million, and most of the young high stakes players here have somewhere between 400-800k that they could reasonably get at. Very few high stakes players post here, but it's easy to see why when more fruitful poker discussion can always be had through AIM/MSN.