That's quite a claim, where's the evidence to back it? There are funds[1] that have consistently beat the market every year for decades, their very existence disproves the gambling hypothesis.
> What do you know that the pros do not?
You're not playing the same game as the pro's so it doesn't really matter. Hedge fund/mutual fund managers are playing with millions/billions of dollars which requires massive liquidity and carefully planned entries and exits over a period of time in order to not move the price too much; that's a completely different game than what a retail investor plays and that means retail investors can chase profits in areas too small for the big guys to play in.
In other words, you don't have to beat the big guys, you're not fishing in the same pond nor playing the same game. Retail investors can enter and exit trades instantly without having to worry about liquidity or slippage, two concerns that dominate the big guys strategies. When you're small, you're nimble in a way the big guys can't be.
As for it not being gambling - there's nothing stopping you beating bookmakers. It's doable, but you need to spend an awful lot of time researching sports (or whatever). It's the same with stocks - the vast majority of people are essentially just taking the spread and making expected losses on every trade, which the bookies (market makers in stock terms) soak up. A few people can spot outliers and take only those bets and make money long term.
I stand by my claim. If it's so easy to make money on the stocks why isn't everyone doing it?
Sure, and I agree on that point.
> If it's so easy to make money on the stocks why isn't everyone doing it?
No one said it was easy. Merely that it's not gambling; gambling implies that's it's random and you can't find any edge, but people clearly do find edges and make money consistently so it's not gambling, it's just damn hard. However, it's a fallacy to conclude that you have to be better than the pros to make money for exactly the reason I specified, the pros are playing a harder game because the more money you have, the harder it is to find alpha.
It's vastly easier to get a 10% return on a few tens of thousands that it is on millions or billions because of liquidity and slippage. You can't exit a losing position in the billions instantly like you can when you have a few thousand, or enter quickly, it's an entirely different game.
How is that gambling?
By choosing proper low-fee funds you can minimize the brokerage fees (and you can buy securities at net asset value) so that half of your critique of long-term profitability is untrue.
No it doesn't. I was a professional poker player, and professionals have existed for decades. Their existence doesn't mean there's no gambling in poker.
If you're taking offense to the wording of "just gambling," sure, I can see that. Like poker, it's gambling with an element of skill. Or perhaps more aptly put, it's a skill game with a gambling element.
What makes it gambling is that you have no influence over part of the process. You can control your decisions (bet/fold/buy/sell), but the rest (company performance, turn/river cards) is out of your hands.
So yes, of course this is gambling.
What made these academics think they could beat the pros?
I'd give the same answer for someone who wanted to write crypto, and I'd expect much of HN to do the same. We absolutely need more people writing crypto, including crypto for fun. And the existing crypto written by "experts" is often ridiculously insecure. Please, do spend a weekend reading some book and putting together some crypto code to learn how things work. But do not proceed to encrypt your bank account credentials with them and stick the encrypted file on the public internet.
start the video at 8m38s and listen to Simmons explain that he had no idea wat he was doing when he started.
A rare interview with the mathematician who cracked Wall Street https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_simons_a_rare_interview_with_t...
Not to mention the fact that there is a huge number of professionals in this space who can only afford to do what they do because it's their losing their customers money and not their own.
My response was to demonstrate that someone was making up his answer. Now you're digressing into the "well, most people fail" argument.
If you dig into the answer in the link you provided, Simons says gained his initial funding (as well as his data) by what we could accurately call gambling. He had no strategy, no reason to believe he was successful, and no expectation of being successful. He was - through luck - successful. With that success, and having gained money he could then afford to lose, he noticed some structure in the data, and hired some mathematicians to evaluate his hypotheses. It was in fact more likely that he would have lost all his gambled money before even thinking about approaching the problem technically.
He was lucky, in the most straightforward sense. Anyone else, too, could be lucky. But the nature of probability is that the common case is not the lucky case. That's not a digression, that's the exact discussion at hand. If you want to insist that occasionally people are lucky -- sure, and occasionally a newcomer will invent a secure block cipher.
If you have enough money to test hypotheses, and you're okay with losing that money if your hypotheses are wrong, fantastic, go test them. That's exactly what Simons did. If you want to get rich by investing in the stock market without a strategy and hoping to get lucky, well, yes, some people get lucky. Simons happened to be one of them. But that's hardly evidence you should emulate that part of his behavior.
Also, no one said the goal here wanted to get rich. Learning more about the math, etc would be interesting. Please don't tell us what's in the video again.
That's not what I claimed. I claimed there were two steps. Step 1 is to acquire enough capital that you're okay losing it. Step 2 is to use that capital. Step 1 is what I claimed he was lucky. Step 2 is the one that lasted 20 years. Without step 1 (and there are many ways to do step 1 that don't involve luck, as well as many ways that don't involve investing), you can't proceed to step 2.
> Learning more about the math, etc would be interesting.
That is definitely interesting, and I agreed with that point upthread. You don't have to use actual money to learn about the math, though. If you want to learn stuff on simulations, everything I've been saying about capital you can afford to lose doesn't matter. However, the one and only thing simulations can't do is get you rich.
JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. I started trading and it went very well. I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. I mean, I think it was pure luck. It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models -- just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on.
That's basically what I said. I didn't claim that he had a brilliant and correct answer before he started. (Nor am I claiming that you need to have a brilliant and correct plan for a cryptosystem before you start.) I'm claiming that he had the resources to make experimentation not ruinous (the first part of that story is how he acquired those resources, namely, "pure luck" which "certainly wasn't mathematical modeling"), and he engaged in that experimentation and took the scientific method seriously (the second part of that story).
Besides everyone's always recommending low-cost index funds, the ones that would have given one a 31 basis point return over last year tracking the S&P500? With the gain in wealth over the last year for a 100k investment, one could almost buy a Nexus 6P on sale. Brilliant.
These triggers could be considered a proxy for fear ("IF JPM dividend decreases THEN SELL JPM") and greed ("IF Fed raises interest rates THEN BUY VXX"). These codify and act on what a user expects their emotions to be.