Online Stock Trading vs. Online Poker

[DavidNB]

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My point is that reading reports is not a requirement for day trading.

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I stand corrected and you are right. There is no requirement for day trading. Day trading could be compared to fish in poker, people that have no idea whats going on.

[Sniper]

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My point is that reading reports is not a requirement for day trading.

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I stand corrected and you are right. There is no requirement for day trading. Day trading could be compared to fish in poker, people that have no idea whats going on.

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David, based on the totality of your comments in this thread, it is clear that you have no idea what Trading is...

[CybrPunk]

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Stock trading ( which is all online by the way)is very different then poker which can be played online or live. Stock trading is all long term and based on many different fields. You gotta be able to read company fincial reports and so on and understand them. Its not about buying stock on Monday and seeing it increase in value during the week then selling on Friday. Trying to compare poker to stock trading just doesn't add up, not the same.

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My point is that reading reports is not a requirement for day trading.
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I stand corrected and you are right. There is no requirement for day trading. Day trading could be compared to fish in poker, people that have no idea whats going on.

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All of your statements are completely incorrect. You should really try and obtain some actual facts before posting garbage like this.

Even a monkey can spew feces on a wall... and sometimes he'll hit the target too.

Unfortunately you missed this time.

[cardcounter0]

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Stock trading ( which is all online by the way)

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Is that true? I know they have computerized matching of prices now, and "pre-arranged" trades of huge blocks of stocks among parties, but isn't the vast majority of trades of NYSE listed stock still required to be traded via "open outcry" in the pits? Why are all those specialists milling about on the floor of the NYSE if it is all done online?

[DavidNB]

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Stock trading ( which is all online by the way)

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Is that true? I know they have computerized matching of prices now, and "pre-arranged" trades of huge blocks of stocks among parties, but isn't the vast majority of trades of NYSE listed stock still required to be traded via "open outcry" in the pits? Why are all those specialists milling about on the floor of the NYSE if it is all done online?

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By online I mean via computer of course. Yes there are some milling around the floor but this takes in a large amount of different types of trades. Anyhow, this may be 100 or so but every investment office across America also trades online and not in person. There isn't a vast majority of trades of NYSE being done on the floor, I would be surprised if even 1% of trades are done on the floor. The problem being computers can do it so much faster and as you pointed out, have predetrimed buyinng and selling. One of the big dips (black Monday) in the past was because of computers and predetrimed selling points. I beleive regulation was brought in afterwards restricting some of this auto buying and selling.

[tizlinda]

I moved from online stock trading to poker simply because I realized stocks were more of a gamble for me. I got tired of watching my so called investments go down because of the many arbitrary goings on in the world, mostly unrelated to my own investment. I did spend a lot of time studying and learning all I could on the market and strategy, but the fact was, all the strategy in the world can't overcome natural disasters, man made disasters, or people waking up on the wrong side of the bed, feeling sad and deciding to sell and move to Florida. Stocks were like a crap game, with nearly as many ways to wager.

Poker was a game I understood better and required a bit less time to study, but you do have to study to get the edge. It has been a far more profitable "investment" for my needs. I have actually gotten myself out of the hole stocks put me in.

How anyone could say stocks aren't a gamble is beyond me, Even if the avg Rate of return is 10% a year, it doesn't mean your going to find the stocks that produce that, some win some lose, (some hands win some lose). Every day that you buy and sell your gambling it won't go up or down the next day with absolutely no.....zero.....way of knowing this to be true other than gut instinct. Poker has way more certainty than this.

[Piece of Cake]

Grats to David on the leveling job. I totally forgot about that part where I sign off before each of my blind trades that I reviewed the financial statements of the companies I'm purchasing.

As for the day-trading protection rules - similar protection devices can/have been enacted by card sites. You can't deposit more than X per day, per week, etc. None the less - despite these day trading rules, I can drop a load of cash on a single risky microcap OTCBB stock that I've never heard of this very instant with no due diligence and sell it today or a couple days from now. Or if I sign a form I can buy a ton of out of the money options if I so choose. It's very clear to me that I can gamble legally with my online broker.

[Tuee]

I think one fundamental difference between poker and equity investment that has been overlooked in this thread so far is that poker is a zero-sum game (in fact, negative after the rake), whereas stock investment is a positive-sum game in the long run. The average investor is eventually a winner.

The purpose of day trading is to beat the market average (e.g. the S&P 500 index). If you measure "profit" as the degree to which you out-perform (or under-perform) the market average, then trading is a zero-sum game, simply by the definition of "average". But it's only zero-sum in comparison to the "benchmark"-- and the benchmark is positive. Which means that, even if you only "break even" relative to the benchmark, you're doing okay in the long-run.

In fact, the majority of professionally-managed mutual funds under-perform the market after commissions, so for an investor to just "settle" for the market average ain't so bad.

You don't need to be an expert to outperform the majority of "professionally manged" funds. And it's easy to do this-- all you have to do is buy and hold a well-diversified, market-representative basket of stocks, and you're guaranteed to be a "winning player" in the long-run.

But the point is, an investment "fish" is actually making money, whereas a poker fish isn't, and I think this makes all the difference.

[UF_Gators]

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Reading reports is a prerequisite for being a succesfull trader


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Not really. A good sized portion of the investing community believes that charts can reveal clues about future performance of a stock without regard to the underlying intrinsic value of the security. Certain patterns in the charts indicate to them how the average investor views the value of that stock and they make investment decisions accordingly. Financial reports also only show historical performance, which may have no relation to future performance. If Apple releases their quarterly earnings today and Steve Jobs croaks tomorrow, the stock will tank with no impact to the reports. Similar companies with similar earnings can be valued very differently because of people's perception of management, the product, trademarks, etc. And many people made a lot of money in the internet bubble trading on momentum and rumor alone. Companies that didn't even have prospects of earnings had larger market caps than GE. People who got in early and got out before the momentum collapsed got rich.

Logic isn't going to win this argument. As someone said, the U.S. has an economic interest in the market and none in offshore casinos. People spend money stupidly every day on TVs, iPods, cars, houses they can't afford, etc and wind up in bankruptcy. Why are they not protected? Because the U.S. has an economic interest in keeping them buying. They appeased the horse racing and Indian lobbies while throwing a bone to their conservative constituency to get reelected....nothing more...nothing less. The only way to deal with a law like this is to get enough people to complain and threaten their election chances next time. Logic isn't going to do it.

[Jeff W]

The Trading vs. Poker argument will take us nowhere--it will convince no one.