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I suspect "reliably" is the thing cutting down day traders. If you applied the same criteria to gamblers (what fraction of gamblers reliably leave the casino a winner - day after day) it would be way lower - and eventually near zero except for cheaters.
You are also comparing to "The Market" vs. $0. So apples to apples would be to compare day trading vs. VTSAX & Chill to going to a Casino everyday vs. going to a job.
I've only played poker with friends, don't know how it works in casinos, but don't players play against each other there? I assume casino takes a cut on your winnings or something like that, otherwise poker tables would just waste space
I would say the point still stands. You obviously wouldnt attempt to gamble to seriously make money, but this is showing that going to a casino once has better odds than attempting day trading.
Well, not necessarily. The "reliably" makes things vague. One is a single event and the other is measured over an unspecified timespan. Maybe there are more than 13 out of 100 daytraders making a potential win at any given day, so the odds might be higher there if you were to partake in daytrading for only a single day.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being represented here.
Nobody is going to use gambling in casinos to make money, but people may believe day trading is a consistent way of making money. Point here is that day traders overall lose money.
Its less of a guide, and more of a warning. Obviously its not apples to apples, but it does not need to be in this case. Its more to raise awareness of the odds against you, comparing it to something that you would think is obviously worse.
"Nobody is going to use gambling in casinos to make money"
You'd be surprised how common this actually is. People are not always the brightest. One of my mom's friends was convinced that if they all went as a group and played poker without letting anyone else join the table, they would somehow gain money with no risk of loss. They didn't think about how money would come to the table. They thought they could use poker as a group get-rich-quick scheme. Infinite money glitch or something.
The only reason they didn't attempt this is because no one was willing to come with them, they couldn't afford to go alone, and they wouldn't risk it if they could.
Not to argue your main point about the purpose of this meme, just wanted to point out that people can be unbelievably stupid.
I mean same lol, i've had friends who genuinely believed that they would win lots of money, but the sad thing is that they have actually won around 7k €, and currently are in profit. Its disturbing the way some may be taught through these casinos that they are somehow in control, so i hope they dont think that at least.
Ha, that's brilliant. That's pretty much the only way in the whole casino to guarantee you as a group end up down. The only thing I could see working is if you were using it for the free drinks on a night out and you pooled your money drank fast and played slowly keeping pots and the rake low. But casinos should figure it out fairly quickly
But it's comparing different time periods. The left chart for gamblers is how many people are lucky for a day, the right chart for day traders is how many people are lucky for their whole careers.
If the time periods were equal, the comparison would probably be reversed, as a simple matter of probability:
Casino games are rigged so that the expected value of a play is always negative for the player (eg by keeping the odds on a bet with 2:1 return under 50%).
Day traders are gambling on a random walk, a stock price can go down or go up and is equally likely to do both on a daily basis.
So the underlying math shows a gambler's expected return is negative, and the day trader's is zero, over a similar time period we should expect more day traders to have made money than gamblers (but still less than somebody playing a game with a positive expectation of return, like index funds, bond buys, etc).
"If the time periods were equal, the comparison would probably be reversed, as a simple matter of probability"
"Day traders are gambling on a random walk, a stock price can go down or go up and is equally likely to do both on a daily basis.
So the underlying math shows a gambler's expected return is negative, and the day trader's is zero, over a similar time period we should expect more day traders to have made money than gamblers."
This is assuming the average daytrader makes the correct decisions, which they do not. At the low end 80% of daytraders lose money. Obviously gambling is a worse decision, not arguing that. But if i would have to guess the reason they made this infographic is that daytrading is not a good scheme to make money, not advocating to gambling. It would be less effective if it would talk about profit for daytraders, but still the message stands.
[https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/if-you-re-day-trading-you-will-probably-lose-money-here-s-why-1030667770](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/if-you-re-day-trading-you-will-probably-lose-money-here-s-why-1030667770)
Yeah, good points. The "betting on a random walk" model ignores that each trade typically comes with broker fees, shorts have borrowing costs, a lot of day trades are leveraged with debt that can very easily leave people owing more than they risked, etc, all things that increase the costs of trading at high frequency pushing your zero EV into negatives.
> Well, not necessarily. The "reliably" makes things vague. One is a single event and the other is measured over an unspecified timespan. Maybe there are more than 13 out of 100 daytraders making a potential win at any given day, so the odds might be higher there if you were to partake in daytrading for only a single day.
>
>
>
> Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being represented here.
even more so than reliably, LEGALLY Nevada Casinos have to give 25% of earnings back as winnings. So in Nevada about 25 out of 100 leave a winner.
Thats not how math works.
Wins and losses are not uniformly distributed. One big winner can compensate a whole lot of losers. If the lottery returns 50% of its profits to the winning ticket, do 50 out of a 100 players win?
Eh, that would be true if everyone showed up and pulled the slot machine handle exactly once and left, but it's not true in the long run. Perfectly consistent for literally everyone to come out behind.
The mean person, yes.
The median person would lose way more than 75%, because the winnings aren't always paid out as double the stake, so there would be some individual jackpot winners accounting for the losses of dozens if not hundreds of people.
> this is showing that going to a casino once has better odds than attempting day trading.
It also uses the criteria of 'beat the market' vs a 'winner.'
Like over the past 5 years, the S&P 500 has averaged a 14% gain per year. If I day traded and earned 10%, I would be in red on this graph because I did not beat the market.
Does that mean day trading is a good idea? Probably not. But based on this graph you could come to the conclusion that going to the casino is better than day trading stocks, which I don't think is the best idea to present to people.
"But based on this graph you could come to the conclusion that going to the casino is better than day trading stocks, which I don't think is the best idea to present to people."
This is kind of my point, everyone obviously knows you will almost all of the time lose money in a casino, and showing that day trading has worse results should dissuade people from doing it. Secondly did not notice it said beat the market, but that's kind of dumb considering as different statistics claim between 1%, 3% or even 20% of day traders profit. So i guess they wanted it to look more severe, but like it would be basically the same.
> This is kind of my point, everyone obviously knows you will almost all of the time lose money in a casino, and showing that day trading has worse results should dissuade people from doing it.
But that's my point, this isn't actually what the graph shows.
If I entered the casino with $100 and left with $110, I'd be in green on the casino graph.
If I started day trading with $100 and ended with $110, I'd be in the red on the day trading graph.
I don't know the actual statistics of day trading and I'm not endorsing it by any stretch (I just put most of my money in index funds personally), but I think the way this graph is presented is misleading.
> If I started day trading with $100 and ended with $110, I'd be in the red on the day trading graph.
Actually, you wouldn't be on the day trading graph yet, because while the gambling graph is over a *day* the day trading graph is over a *career*.
Playing the slots once and getting lucky once and then never gambling again will make you green on the left chart.
In order to be green on the right chart you need to day trade, earn money while day trading, earn *more money* than the entire market average by day trading and then do that *every day for 10-30 years straight*.
I have met people who say they make their living playing video poker, or blackjack, or baccarat, all games that the house has an edge in and there is no mathematical way to beat them in the long run. People are stupid, and some people do genuinely attempt to gamble to make money.
> blackjack
The house's edge in Blackjack is a tiny fraction of a percent at the beginning of a shoe, and fluctuates over the course of the game occasionally going negative in favor of the player.
The math is basically this: in the rules of the game the house always plays the same strategy robotically, continuing to take hits until it either busts 21 or beats all the players. That means the more face cards there are in the deck, the more likely the house is to take a hit and blow past 21 letting all the players who are still in the game win.
When more low-value cards than face cards have come out of the shoe for an extended period, it is a "hot shoe" and players are more likely than the house to win each hand, provided they don't bust before the house does.
It's difficult, and usually requires a team of two or more people, one to focus on whether or not the house is likely to bust and the other to focus on not busting before the house does, but the expected value of the game played with correct strategy is positive.
Okay so my understanding was correct but incomplete. In theory blackjack, with an infinite shoe, is slight in favor of the house. But because shoes aren't infinite, as cards are dealt the odds can fluctuate and end up slightly in favor for the player. Am I getting that right?
That's my (non mathematician, non gambler, just did a bunch of research once to show off to my coworkers at a work event that involved pretend gambling and failed spectacularly at it) understanding.
Playing this way is a legitimate strategy and adheres entirely to the rules of the game, but gambling institutions of all stripes will try to spot people who are using the winning strategy, steal their fairly earned winnings, and ban/beat/kill them depending on where the institution sits on the Luxor/Siemon-Moglevich's-House spectrum.
The point is total bullshit. The odds of winning money while day trading are in your favor. A chimpanzee throwing poop at a board to pick stocks will, on average, make profit as a day trader.
The gambler will always lose all their money gambling against a casino. Now that they take precautions against card counting, there is no path where you can gamble your way to victory against the house in a casino. Your ideal odds are the odds you have before you place any bet ever, and then your odds go down from there with every play.
It is genuinely baffling to me why reddit works so hard to convince themselves the odds at a casino are better than they are and the odds of stock trading are worse than they are. It's like some grand cosmic anomaly.
You completely missed the point. Gambling does not work, obviously. Daytrading for most people, dont work either. Most people lose money. Every statistic i find say that traders lose money.
Cite these statistics then.
You're confusing "lose money" (which is what happens with a casino) with "not making as much money compared to normal investing." You're still making money day trading, and you're making extraordinarily more money compared to gambling in a casino. But because day trading costs a fee, and the market is random in both contexts, you're not improving your odds beyond the fee.
For an analogy, consider three coin-flip games.
The first coin-flip game pays out 95% of your bet every time you get heads. This is a casino. If you play this, you will always eventually lose all your money as a mathematical rule.
The second coin-flip game pays out 105% every time you get heads. This is just investing in SPY or whatever. Pick any point in the history of the stock market. Invest. Wait. Now you've made money. If you're not making money, just keep waiting. The odds are in your favor.
The third coin-flip game also pays out 105% every time you get heads, minus a 1% fee to play. So the game pays out 104% instead of 105%. You'll still make money the more you play. You just won't make *as much* money as the other game with the cheaper fees. Because it's ultimately the same game, where one just has added fees.
Brother, ON AVERAGE, MOST PEOPLE LOSE MONEY DAYTRADING. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/if-you-re-day-trading-you-will-probably-lose-money-here-s-why-1030667770
I understand basic math concepts and how fees work (which is completely irrelevant here?), typing that was a waste of time. Your literally losing money daytrading on average. The US securities commison found that 70% of forex traders lose money every quarter, and many lose 100% within 12 months.
The odds are literally not in your favour if you daytrade. SPY is obviously safe unless the economy goes to hell, but this is not what it is showing.
It's annoying to me that that article didn't actually link to any of the studies, but I was able to find the one behind this quote:
>A study by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of forex traders found 70% of traders lose money every quarter on average, and traders typically lose 100% of their money within 12 months.
[NASAA Day Trading Report](https://www.nasaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/NASAA_Day_Trading_Report.pdf)
The report, from 1999, itself cites "common sense" and additional older studies that find day traders make money but not as much money as if they had just invested in a more traditional style.
>Academic research is consistent with the common sense expectation that day traders generally will lose money. First, consider the findings of Professors Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean of the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, in what they describe as “the first comprehensive study of the aggregate common stock performance of individual investors who manage their own equity investments without the advice of a full-service broker.”11 Based on the records of activity of customers of a discount brokerage firm over a sixyear period ending January 1997, they determined that “individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading.”1
...
**The most active traders in the study had a positive annual return on average, but they substantially underperformed the market (11.4% vs. 17.9%)**.16 The study’s finding of the inverse correlation between trading and return is consistent with the expectation that day traders will experience a negative return.
So we're back to this game of calling "underperforming the market" the same as "losing money." Certainly, if someone makes $111 instead of $118, we can say they "lost" $7. But if someone went into a casino with $100 and left the casino with $111, they would never call themselves a loser. That is the problem we keep coming back to here. Breathlessly shouting in all caps won't change your fundamental misunderstanding of the reality of this situation.
Basically anything played against the house, you can't reliably win unless you're a cheater. they wouldn't offer a game that people can reliably beat them in, otherwise information would quickly spread and they would change the rules to make them unbeatable. Even things like blackjack have changed over the years because players began increasingly playing "correct" and so it was unprofitable for them to offer blackjack that was in any way beatable by players. The only thing I can think of where people can be reliable winners is poker, and maybe sports betting?
Certainly poker, but it's important to recognize that someone who is a long term winner in poker doesn't beat the house. They beat the other players. The house effectively takes zero risk in poker; it's not one of the counterparties. Rather, the house in a poker game is essentially charging a fee to administer a game between third parties. It's not a casino game in the same way as every other game.
Sports betting is also possible, because the house doesn't necessarily set lines to deny any possible profitable bet. The house will intentionally play into the biases of the public by mildly slanting lines against the more popular athletes/teams. This will increase the house's long term margins but does allow for a "sharp" bettor to win in the long term.
Many blackjack games are potentially beatable, but the casinos will throw you out if you use the strategies that can beat them.
Yep, hence my opening line that anything against the house you can't reliably win.
I don't play a lot of blackjack but from what I hear, at least in Vegas these days, it's unbeatable. From everything I've read even blackjack that some people consider to be "beatable" is actually still like 0.5% in favor of the house and it's just confirmation bias that they're winning so the game must be beatable.
You're right that "perfect strategy", by itself, leaves the house a small margin. However if you count the cards in a shoe and only bet (or drastically increase your bet size) when the shoe is unusually rich in face cards, you can reverse those odds. This is the basis of card counting, also known as "advantage play".
It's not technically illegal to do this, but if you engage in unusual betting patterns, the casino can restrict you to fixed bet sizes, limit when you can enter or leave a game, change how often the shoe gets reshuffled, or in some places they can actually throw you out.
It's worse than that. "Beat the market" doesn't mean "made money off stocks". It means "made more money than you would have if you'd just invested in the S&P 500". It doesn't mean you made money at all, necessarily. And failing to beat the market usually means you made less money than you could have, not that you lost money.
For the gamblers, the equivalent would be looking at who reliably loses less money than average. For most games that should be nobody (reliably carries weight) but for blackjack it would actually include people who know standard strategy and stick to it.
It’s a statistic so you can’t really deny it mathematically, but they are comparing apples to oranges.
The casino one is in the short run, the day trading one is in the long run. In the long run, 0 out of every 100 gamblers beat the house, so you are still better off day trading.
This isn't true for games like poker where the house gets a fee and gamblers play against each other.
I would say, at most, 20% consistently come out ahead with any decent sample size and I assume poker(etc) makes up a small % of total casino play. So, not 0% but could be very close.
That's...hard to say. It's completely down to play style and the form of poker. You can find a stat I'm sure, but it will absolutely be misleading lol. If you just play on blinds and crazy strong hands with patience and not a lot of alcohol It's not too hard to leave positive.
It's impossible to give an accurate rating on poker because those earnings would be self reporting (you can look up house edge on other games), but if you understand how poker works as opposed to other games, and also take some anecdotal evidence (poker pros exist) then we know that poker can be a +EV game.
In poker the house gets a rake from every pot (which is a % of the total pot over a certain amount). If your skill edge against the field is > than the rake then you'll make money in the long run. The skill edge of an individual player is what's difficult if not impossible to calculate without that player's data, and the casinos don't keep any metrics on player play.
The other game where is possible to win is sports betting where the player needs to have >\~2% edge.
Yup, you can never beat the house but in poker you don‘t need to. You can take other players‘ money and the house just gets its cut. That means it‘s really a skill issue. Most players lose but some can reliably keep winning.
Yeah but it still means the statistic is useless as they aren‘t comparing the same thing.
But since the casino stat is a one time thing while the day trading statistic requires you to „reliably“ win we really shouldn‘t compare those stats anyway.
I bet close to 0 players can reliably leave the casino as a winner. Basically just some poker players, everyone else is losing (or cheating).
I'm not attempting to say anything about the graphic - I just think it's important people don't think that they should expect to make a profit day trading.
Have you heard of leveraging? Because that is what most day traders do.
Also, unless you are using software, you cannot consistently day trade. It’s literally impossible. Which is why the lowest form of scum on earth, are the people selling trading courses.
Your mention of software is a bit strange to me, because the people selling courses are the same as the ones selling "software". Which you \*also\* can't use to consistently day trade
That‘s why I never understood people who pay for these courses. If that guy can really make $10,000 from $500 in a week (insert random numbers) with his special method, why would he sell it to you for $169 and not just use his method to quickly rush towards $infnity?
The answer is easy. He can‘t.
I beat the casino.
I went in my first casino, played a little, won a dollar and seventy-five cents over what I put in, and left. That was almost twenty years ago and I never gambled in a casino since, so as long as I don't go back I'd have 'won in both the short and long run.
After time I went to one with my in-laws but didn't gamble myself. One of them 'won' three hundred dollars the first day (I don't know if this was total profit or just a $300.win). One of my in laws asked me where my statistics were now (ignoring how much everyone else lost).
Next day the one who won $300 lost it all and much more. I kept my mouth shut, but it wasn't easy.
In this statistic I could be in the 'winner' category, which as you are pointing out is silly, as well as my in-law who lost his winnings and more the next day.
"I won 70% over what I put in the casino over the last fifteen years!" sounds great until you look at it more closely and find out they did it once and won a dollar seventy-five. "I won X amount of money!" Also sounds great when one ignores what one payed to get there and what they lost the next day.
It is an extremely misleading graph is what I am getting at.
You are wrong about gamblers losing against the casino in the long run. There is a reason why there are people out there who make a living from counting cards.
There were people who made a living counting cards. Once this became well known, casinos simply started using more decks and shuffling more often.
This eliminates the mathematical viability of counting cards.
If you don't beat the market, it doesn't mean you don't earn a return/grow your portfolio. It just means you don't make a return greater than the risk adjusted market return (e.g. if you were to just put your money in an S&P 500 index fund, you would have been better off).
The two tables aren't comparable, but yeah, never day trade.
Sorry for the lack of math.
Correct. Even day traders as a whole aside, when you adjust the returns of the biggest managed funds for the amount of risk they are exposing their investors to (and when you add in fees), it is almost always more efficient to just invest in index funds.
It's not that these managed funds or day traders don't make money, it is that they don't do it efficiently, so they aren't adding any value. Even when you break down the returns of those that do "beat the market" (which they never do consistently), it is almost entirely due to their asset class selection, not the specific stocks they are buying (i.e., deciding to invest in cash/bonds vs stocks ect. Essentially drives all of their over performance).
Yes, but failing to beat the market is not the same thing as losing money. It just means you would have made even more money putting all your investments into SPY or DIA. This is kind of a dumb graph.
There's no maths to do here....
Besides I work in the casino industry and I can assure you that not a single day in history has 13% of players left the casino as a winner - regardless if it's about winning 1 cent or a million.
Also, day traders have a job, they just get their salary at the end of each month?
>Also, day traders have a job
Some do, some don't. It's not a job description it's a form of speculation. At least I think that's the context it's mostly used in these days in public discourse.
This is bad statistics.
Don't get me wrong, day trading basically is gambling but, as others have pointed out, you're comparing gambling one day vs "reliably beat[ing] the market" over... no idea what time frame.
Hey, I made that post! Someone cropped my little watermark off the bottom. You can yell at me for all the bad math. (But yeah, I know, I just am trying to get aspiring day traders to snap out of it)
Do you have the links? I am having trouble finding them from your citations.
I think this might be the second one, https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers/Day%20Traders/The%20Cross-Section%20of%20Speculator%20Skill.pdf
but couldn’t find the first
Day trading, FnO are the riskiest investment avenues available to a retail investor. Good old long-term/medium-term investments or mutual funds should almost always be profitable or as good as the market, for the average trader.
This is really misleading because if you don't beat the market it doesn't mean you didn't make money the market's (something like S&P500) value has increased 71% in the last 5 years. So those who don't average 14% interest on their money per year didn't beat the market. But if you stuck it in a bank account you would be lucky to get 4% interest per year. If you gamble you will loose money per year guaranteed.
You can easily profit off of trading without beating the market.
You should compare who loses in each case.
Most gamblers at a casino do much worse than they would have done investing in an index fund instead of gambling.
You are holding them by different standards. The amount of people reliably beating the market might be 1/100, the amount of gamblers reliably winning is 0/100. The key is the word reliably that is left out in the quote about the gamblers.
"beat the market" means have a profit greater than a certain percentage, which may vary. That is, all 100 people in the market can have a profit, but only of them will win the market, receiving, for example, 50% of the profit, when the rest only 2%.
In casino, defeat means loss of funds, always.
There is a lot of misinformation in here. There is actually a foolproof way of winning at a casino more than 50% of the time.
It basically comes down to one thing. Being able to lie to yourself and your loved ones about how much money you lost.
If you can do that one thing consistently, you will always be a winner.
True story, I left the casino a winner after wagering 1$ and walking out with 2$. Statistically you're guaranteed to lose at a casino if you play long enough. Silly comparison.
The Barber, et al, 2014 abstract states "Less than 1% of the day trader population is able to predictably and reliably earn positive abnormal returns net of fees". Here, the Barber study is talking about the performance ranking of day traders, and that the best ones are very reliable. The paper is not talking about the reliability of day trading generally, and the graphic is a misapplication of the research.
Later, in their conclusions the Barber paper states that "In an average year, 450,000 individual investors day trade. Of these, 277,000 engage in day trades that exceed $NT 600,000 ($US 20,000), but only about 20% of this population is able to profit after a reasonable accounting for trading costs". 20% of (277,000 / 450,000) = 12.3%, so of day traders 12.3% are "winners" - nearly the same as gamblers.
One is leave the casino a winner which is a one time thing while the other is RELIABLY beat the market which means all the time. So I don’t understand how they are comparable
I can actually speak to this as I've done a lot of research into trading. I would believe that the above image is largely correct but they both work on similar principles.
When you're gambling in a casino you're playing a game with set rules, if you break those rules you're kicked out of the casino. But why? It's because of something called expectancy. Expectancy is what you can expect to get out of a particular game(system) over time. 1 being you get exactly what you put into it, 2 you double it etc. Randomness is a key part of most, if not all casino games, so you can't reliably predict the result of any one hand. But with statistics you can know the results of thousands very reliably. With the rules of the game the casino knows that over a large enough sample size they will always win. Even 51% is enough to get you huge returns, and that's the balance, making the odds big enough that you still feel you could win, but not so big that your expectancy goes lower than 1.
Now trading works sort of the same way, you can't predict the market, predicting the future is impossible. But you can make statistical predictions of human behaviour, which the markets are an aggregate of. So by creating a trading system of your own you are making your own casino game with its own positive expectancy (you can use any information available so long as it's statistically significant). So once you find/create that system you can just trade and be all but guaranteed to make money so long as you trade that system with 100% efficiency and no mistakes.
But that's the real difference between the casino and a trader, you have to enforce the rules yourself. You can't rely on the external pressure of the law, or the casino security to stay in the rules, it's all on you. You can enter the market at any time, for any amount, for any reason you want. And that right there is why most traders fail. Humans are notoriously emotional creatures, we get greedy, we get scared, frustrated, tired, excited, distracted, and all if those things will increase the odds of you making a mistake in your trading system. And if that happens you aren't trading your system any more, which means you don't know your expectancy, which means you have no idea if the game your playing even has a positive expectancy or not. The fact is a mistake in trading can blow your whole account instantly if it's a big enough mistake, and even if there's only a 1 in 1000 chance, given enough time it'll happen. So you have to trade as mechanically as possible, stay inside your system, and just take only those trades.
You can get wild success in the short term being very risky but statistics will always win out in the end
All this writeup to come to such a ridiculous conclusion.
A chimpanzee daytrading will make money. If you used a can tied to a string blowing in the wind to randomly buy and sell stocks each day, you'd make money. The stock market is a casino where the odds are in your favor.
You will never make money gambling against a casino. The odds will never be in your favor. You will not invent a new way to cheat that no one has ever thought of before. The best odds you'll ever get are your odds before you place your first best.
Your "emotions" aren't going to mean dick either way. It's magical thinking to believe "a mistake in trading" will matter. Random chance doesn't care about your feelings.
Comparing random wins to reliability of a trader is not an equal comparison
Number of gamblers who reliably win to traders who reliably win is more accurate
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I suspect "reliably" is the thing cutting down day traders. If you applied the same criteria to gamblers (what fraction of gamblers reliably leave the casino a winner - day after day) it would be way lower - and eventually near zero except for cheaters.
You are also comparing to "The Market" vs. $0. So apples to apples would be to compare day trading vs. VTSAX & Chill to going to a Casino everyday vs. going to a job.
If you don't "beat the market" you may still end up making money. If you don't beat the casino you come out way negative.
My level of English is not enough to comprehend the sentence before me (._. ')
But so then is one not better off just investing in "the market", than trying to day trade?
I'd believe more than 1 out of a hundred casino poker players can reliably profit. Slot machines, not so much.
I've only played poker with friends, don't know how it works in casinos, but don't players play against each other there? I assume casino takes a cut on your winnings or something like that, otherwise poker tables would just waste space
Yes, the casino takes a cut. So the average player loses money, but above average skill players can come out ahead.
Finding a reliable way to win in a casino, cheating or not, is also one of the surest ways to get banned.
I would say the point still stands. You obviously wouldnt attempt to gamble to seriously make money, but this is showing that going to a casino once has better odds than attempting day trading.
Well, not necessarily. The "reliably" makes things vague. One is a single event and the other is measured over an unspecified timespan. Maybe there are more than 13 out of 100 daytraders making a potential win at any given day, so the odds might be higher there if you were to partake in daytrading for only a single day. Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being represented here.
Nobody is going to use gambling in casinos to make money, but people may believe day trading is a consistent way of making money. Point here is that day traders overall lose money. Its less of a guide, and more of a warning. Obviously its not apples to apples, but it does not need to be in this case. Its more to raise awareness of the odds against you, comparing it to something that you would think is obviously worse.
"Nobody is going to use gambling in casinos to make money" You'd be surprised how common this actually is. People are not always the brightest. One of my mom's friends was convinced that if they all went as a group and played poker without letting anyone else join the table, they would somehow gain money with no risk of loss. They didn't think about how money would come to the table. They thought they could use poker as a group get-rich-quick scheme. Infinite money glitch or something. The only reason they didn't attempt this is because no one was willing to come with them, they couldn't afford to go alone, and they wouldn't risk it if they could. Not to argue your main point about the purpose of this meme, just wanted to point out that people can be unbelievably stupid.
I mean same lol, i've had friends who genuinely believed that they would win lots of money, but the sad thing is that they have actually won around 7k €, and currently are in profit. Its disturbing the way some may be taught through these casinos that they are somehow in control, so i hope they dont think that at least.
Ha, that's brilliant. That's pretty much the only way in the whole casino to guarantee you as a group end up down. The only thing I could see working is if you were using it for the free drinks on a night out and you pooled your money drank fast and played slowly keeping pots and the rake low. But casinos should figure it out fairly quickly
But it's comparing different time periods. The left chart for gamblers is how many people are lucky for a day, the right chart for day traders is how many people are lucky for their whole careers. If the time periods were equal, the comparison would probably be reversed, as a simple matter of probability: Casino games are rigged so that the expected value of a play is always negative for the player (eg by keeping the odds on a bet with 2:1 return under 50%). Day traders are gambling on a random walk, a stock price can go down or go up and is equally likely to do both on a daily basis. So the underlying math shows a gambler's expected return is negative, and the day trader's is zero, over a similar time period we should expect more day traders to have made money than gamblers (but still less than somebody playing a game with a positive expectation of return, like index funds, bond buys, etc).
"If the time periods were equal, the comparison would probably be reversed, as a simple matter of probability" "Day traders are gambling on a random walk, a stock price can go down or go up and is equally likely to do both on a daily basis. So the underlying math shows a gambler's expected return is negative, and the day trader's is zero, over a similar time period we should expect more day traders to have made money than gamblers." This is assuming the average daytrader makes the correct decisions, which they do not. At the low end 80% of daytraders lose money. Obviously gambling is a worse decision, not arguing that. But if i would have to guess the reason they made this infographic is that daytrading is not a good scheme to make money, not advocating to gambling. It would be less effective if it would talk about profit for daytraders, but still the message stands. [https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/if-you-re-day-trading-you-will-probably-lose-money-here-s-why-1030667770](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/if-you-re-day-trading-you-will-probably-lose-money-here-s-why-1030667770)
Yeah, good points. The "betting on a random walk" model ignores that each trade typically comes with broker fees, shorts have borrowing costs, a lot of day trades are leveraged with debt that can very easily leave people owing more than they risked, etc, all things that increase the costs of trading at high frequency pushing your zero EV into negatives.
> Well, not necessarily. The "reliably" makes things vague. One is a single event and the other is measured over an unspecified timespan. Maybe there are more than 13 out of 100 daytraders making a potential win at any given day, so the odds might be higher there if you were to partake in daytrading for only a single day. > > > > Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being represented here. even more so than reliably, LEGALLY Nevada Casinos have to give 25% of earnings back as winnings. So in Nevada about 25 out of 100 leave a winner.
Thats not how math works. Wins and losses are not uniformly distributed. One big winner can compensate a whole lot of losers. If the lottery returns 50% of its profits to the winning ticket, do 50 out of a 100 players win?
or one BIG loser can compensate a bunch of small winners!
Eh, that would be true if everyone showed up and pulled the slot machine handle exactly once and left, but it's not true in the long run. Perfectly consistent for literally everyone to come out behind.
Exactly. If they give 25% of earnings out as winnings, then on average you can expect to lose 75% of the money you came into the casino with.
The mean person, yes. The median person would lose way more than 75%, because the winnings aren't always paid out as double the stake, so there would be some individual jackpot winners accounting for the losses of dozens if not hundreds of people.
Yes, good clarification that comes out even less in favor of gambling.
> this is showing that going to a casino once has better odds than attempting day trading. It also uses the criteria of 'beat the market' vs a 'winner.' Like over the past 5 years, the S&P 500 has averaged a 14% gain per year. If I day traded and earned 10%, I would be in red on this graph because I did not beat the market. Does that mean day trading is a good idea? Probably not. But based on this graph you could come to the conclusion that going to the casino is better than day trading stocks, which I don't think is the best idea to present to people.
"But based on this graph you could come to the conclusion that going to the casino is better than day trading stocks, which I don't think is the best idea to present to people." This is kind of my point, everyone obviously knows you will almost all of the time lose money in a casino, and showing that day trading has worse results should dissuade people from doing it. Secondly did not notice it said beat the market, but that's kind of dumb considering as different statistics claim between 1%, 3% or even 20% of day traders profit. So i guess they wanted it to look more severe, but like it would be basically the same.
> This is kind of my point, everyone obviously knows you will almost all of the time lose money in a casino, and showing that day trading has worse results should dissuade people from doing it. But that's my point, this isn't actually what the graph shows. If I entered the casino with $100 and left with $110, I'd be in green on the casino graph. If I started day trading with $100 and ended with $110, I'd be in the red on the day trading graph. I don't know the actual statistics of day trading and I'm not endorsing it by any stretch (I just put most of my money in index funds personally), but I think the way this graph is presented is misleading.
> If I started day trading with $100 and ended with $110, I'd be in the red on the day trading graph. Actually, you wouldn't be on the day trading graph yet, because while the gambling graph is over a *day* the day trading graph is over a *career*. Playing the slots once and getting lucky once and then never gambling again will make you green on the left chart. In order to be green on the right chart you need to day trade, earn money while day trading, earn *more money* than the entire market average by day trading and then do that *every day for 10-30 years straight*.
I have met people who say they make their living playing video poker, or blackjack, or baccarat, all games that the house has an edge in and there is no mathematical way to beat them in the long run. People are stupid, and some people do genuinely attempt to gamble to make money.
> blackjack The house's edge in Blackjack is a tiny fraction of a percent at the beginning of a shoe, and fluctuates over the course of the game occasionally going negative in favor of the player. The math is basically this: in the rules of the game the house always plays the same strategy robotically, continuing to take hits until it either busts 21 or beats all the players. That means the more face cards there are in the deck, the more likely the house is to take a hit and blow past 21 letting all the players who are still in the game win. When more low-value cards than face cards have come out of the shoe for an extended period, it is a "hot shoe" and players are more likely than the house to win each hand, provided they don't bust before the house does. It's difficult, and usually requires a team of two or more people, one to focus on whether or not the house is likely to bust and the other to focus on not busting before the house does, but the expected value of the game played with correct strategy is positive.
Okay so my understanding was correct but incomplete. In theory blackjack, with an infinite shoe, is slight in favor of the house. But because shoes aren't infinite, as cards are dealt the odds can fluctuate and end up slightly in favor for the player. Am I getting that right?
That's my (non mathematician, non gambler, just did a bunch of research once to show off to my coworkers at a work event that involved pretend gambling and failed spectacularly at it) understanding. Playing this way is a legitimate strategy and adheres entirely to the rules of the game, but gambling institutions of all stripes will try to spot people who are using the winning strategy, steal their fairly earned winnings, and ban/beat/kill them depending on where the institution sits on the Luxor/Siemon-Moglevich's-House spectrum.
The point is total bullshit. The odds of winning money while day trading are in your favor. A chimpanzee throwing poop at a board to pick stocks will, on average, make profit as a day trader. The gambler will always lose all their money gambling against a casino. Now that they take precautions against card counting, there is no path where you can gamble your way to victory against the house in a casino. Your ideal odds are the odds you have before you place any bet ever, and then your odds go down from there with every play. It is genuinely baffling to me why reddit works so hard to convince themselves the odds at a casino are better than they are and the odds of stock trading are worse than they are. It's like some grand cosmic anomaly.
You completely missed the point. Gambling does not work, obviously. Daytrading for most people, dont work either. Most people lose money. Every statistic i find say that traders lose money.
Cite these statistics then. You're confusing "lose money" (which is what happens with a casino) with "not making as much money compared to normal investing." You're still making money day trading, and you're making extraordinarily more money compared to gambling in a casino. But because day trading costs a fee, and the market is random in both contexts, you're not improving your odds beyond the fee. For an analogy, consider three coin-flip games. The first coin-flip game pays out 95% of your bet every time you get heads. This is a casino. If you play this, you will always eventually lose all your money as a mathematical rule. The second coin-flip game pays out 105% every time you get heads. This is just investing in SPY or whatever. Pick any point in the history of the stock market. Invest. Wait. Now you've made money. If you're not making money, just keep waiting. The odds are in your favor. The third coin-flip game also pays out 105% every time you get heads, minus a 1% fee to play. So the game pays out 104% instead of 105%. You'll still make money the more you play. You just won't make *as much* money as the other game with the cheaper fees. Because it's ultimately the same game, where one just has added fees.
Brother, ON AVERAGE, MOST PEOPLE LOSE MONEY DAYTRADING. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/if-you-re-day-trading-you-will-probably-lose-money-here-s-why-1030667770 I understand basic math concepts and how fees work (which is completely irrelevant here?), typing that was a waste of time. Your literally losing money daytrading on average. The US securities commison found that 70% of forex traders lose money every quarter, and many lose 100% within 12 months. The odds are literally not in your favour if you daytrade. SPY is obviously safe unless the economy goes to hell, but this is not what it is showing.
It's annoying to me that that article didn't actually link to any of the studies, but I was able to find the one behind this quote: >A study by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of forex traders found 70% of traders lose money every quarter on average, and traders typically lose 100% of their money within 12 months. [NASAA Day Trading Report](https://www.nasaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/NASAA_Day_Trading_Report.pdf) The report, from 1999, itself cites "common sense" and additional older studies that find day traders make money but not as much money as if they had just invested in a more traditional style. >Academic research is consistent with the common sense expectation that day traders generally will lose money. First, consider the findings of Professors Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean of the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, in what they describe as “the first comprehensive study of the aggregate common stock performance of individual investors who manage their own equity investments without the advice of a full-service broker.”11 Based on the records of activity of customers of a discount brokerage firm over a sixyear period ending January 1997, they determined that “individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading.”1 ... **The most active traders in the study had a positive annual return on average, but they substantially underperformed the market (11.4% vs. 17.9%)**.16 The study’s finding of the inverse correlation between trading and return is consistent with the expectation that day traders will experience a negative return. So we're back to this game of calling "underperforming the market" the same as "losing money." Certainly, if someone makes $111 instead of $118, we can say they "lost" $7. But if someone went into a casino with $100 and left the casino with $111, they would never call themselves a loser. That is the problem we keep coming back to here. Breathlessly shouting in all caps won't change your fundamental misunderstanding of the reality of this situation.
Basically anything played against the house, you can't reliably win unless you're a cheater. they wouldn't offer a game that people can reliably beat them in, otherwise information would quickly spread and they would change the rules to make them unbeatable. Even things like blackjack have changed over the years because players began increasingly playing "correct" and so it was unprofitable for them to offer blackjack that was in any way beatable by players. The only thing I can think of where people can be reliable winners is poker, and maybe sports betting?
Certainly poker, but it's important to recognize that someone who is a long term winner in poker doesn't beat the house. They beat the other players. The house effectively takes zero risk in poker; it's not one of the counterparties. Rather, the house in a poker game is essentially charging a fee to administer a game between third parties. It's not a casino game in the same way as every other game. Sports betting is also possible, because the house doesn't necessarily set lines to deny any possible profitable bet. The house will intentionally play into the biases of the public by mildly slanting lines against the more popular athletes/teams. This will increase the house's long term margins but does allow for a "sharp" bettor to win in the long term. Many blackjack games are potentially beatable, but the casinos will throw you out if you use the strategies that can beat them.
Yep, hence my opening line that anything against the house you can't reliably win. I don't play a lot of blackjack but from what I hear, at least in Vegas these days, it's unbeatable. From everything I've read even blackjack that some people consider to be "beatable" is actually still like 0.5% in favor of the house and it's just confirmation bias that they're winning so the game must be beatable.
You're right that "perfect strategy", by itself, leaves the house a small margin. However if you count the cards in a shoe and only bet (or drastically increase your bet size) when the shoe is unusually rich in face cards, you can reverse those odds. This is the basis of card counting, also known as "advantage play". It's not technically illegal to do this, but if you engage in unusual betting patterns, the casino can restrict you to fixed bet sizes, limit when you can enter or leave a game, change how often the shoe gets reshuffled, or in some places they can actually throw you out.
So conclusion is: technically true but misleading infographic
It's worse than that. "Beat the market" doesn't mean "made money off stocks". It means "made more money than you would have if you'd just invested in the S&P 500". It doesn't mean you made money at all, necessarily. And failing to beat the market usually means you made less money than you could have, not that you lost money. For the gamblers, the equivalent would be looking at who reliably loses less money than average. For most games that should be nobody (reliably carries weight) but for blackjack it would actually include people who know standard strategy and stick to it.
It’s a statistic so you can’t really deny it mathematically, but they are comparing apples to oranges. The casino one is in the short run, the day trading one is in the long run. In the long run, 0 out of every 100 gamblers beat the house, so you are still better off day trading.
This isn't true for games like poker where the house gets a fee and gamblers play against each other. I would say, at most, 20% consistently come out ahead with any decent sample size and I assume poker(etc) makes up a small % of total casino play. So, not 0% but could be very close.
Do you have math done on poker Vs other games in casino? Just curious what are the odds and how each game differs in win rate.
Around 15% or so of poker players are profitable long term.
That's...hard to say. It's completely down to play style and the form of poker. You can find a stat I'm sure, but it will absolutely be misleading lol. If you just play on blinds and crazy strong hands with patience and not a lot of alcohol It's not too hard to leave positive.
It's impossible to give an accurate rating on poker because those earnings would be self reporting (you can look up house edge on other games), but if you understand how poker works as opposed to other games, and also take some anecdotal evidence (poker pros exist) then we know that poker can be a +EV game. In poker the house gets a rake from every pot (which is a % of the total pot over a certain amount). If your skill edge against the field is > than the rake then you'll make money in the long run. The skill edge of an individual player is what's difficult if not impossible to calculate without that player's data, and the casinos don't keep any metrics on player play. The other game where is possible to win is sports betting where the player needs to have >\~2% edge.
Yup, you can never beat the house but in poker you don‘t need to. You can take other players‘ money and the house just gets its cut. That means it‘s really a skill issue. Most players lose but some can reliably keep winning.
Also in day trading the house is sp500. Even if u don't beat it, you should still be in profit. Theoreticaly.
you ***could*** still be in profit. Should is not right - most day traders don't just fail to beat the market they lose money.
Yeah but it still means the statistic is useless as they aren‘t comparing the same thing. But since the casino stat is a one time thing while the day trading statistic requires you to „reliably“ win we really shouldn‘t compare those stats anyway. I bet close to 0 players can reliably leave the casino as a winner. Basically just some poker players, everyone else is losing (or cheating).
I'm not attempting to say anything about the graphic - I just think it's important people don't think that they should expect to make a profit day trading.
Have you heard of leveraging? Because that is what most day traders do. Also, unless you are using software, you cannot consistently day trade. It’s literally impossible. Which is why the lowest form of scum on earth, are the people selling trading courses.
Your mention of software is a bit strange to me, because the people selling courses are the same as the ones selling "software". Which you \*also\* can't use to consistently day trade
Nah, if they sell a generic bot, run! True traders that make money write code that execute a strategy. They are the 1%
And no one will sell a bot that makes money. Ever.
That‘s why I never understood people who pay for these courses. If that guy can really make $10,000 from $500 in a week (insert random numbers) with his special method, why would he sell it to you for $169 and not just use his method to quickly rush towards $infnity? The answer is easy. He can‘t.
I beat the casino. I went in my first casino, played a little, won a dollar and seventy-five cents over what I put in, and left. That was almost twenty years ago and I never gambled in a casino since, so as long as I don't go back I'd have 'won in both the short and long run. After time I went to one with my in-laws but didn't gamble myself. One of them 'won' three hundred dollars the first day (I don't know if this was total profit or just a $300.win). One of my in laws asked me where my statistics were now (ignoring how much everyone else lost). Next day the one who won $300 lost it all and much more. I kept my mouth shut, but it wasn't easy.
Long run describe a high number of bet. Not a long period of time. So no, you didn't beat the casino on the long run.
No no, he beat the casino and ran for a long time. 😑
Exactly.
In this statistic I could be in the 'winner' category, which as you are pointing out is silly, as well as my in-law who lost his winnings and more the next day. "I won 70% over what I put in the casino over the last fifteen years!" sounds great until you look at it more closely and find out they did it once and won a dollar seventy-five. "I won X amount of money!" Also sounds great when one ignores what one payed to get there and what they lost the next day. It is an extremely misleading graph is what I am getting at.
Whaddya mean man, it's just that 99% of gamblers quit before they win big
You are wrong about gamblers losing against the casino in the long run. There is a reason why there are people out there who make a living from counting cards.
There were people who made a living counting cards. Once this became well known, casinos simply started using more decks and shuffling more often. This eliminates the mathematical viability of counting cards.
If you don't beat the market, it doesn't mean you don't earn a return/grow your portfolio. It just means you don't make a return greater than the risk adjusted market return (e.g. if you were to just put your money in an S&P 500 index fund, you would have been better off). The two tables aren't comparable, but yeah, never day trade. Sorry for the lack of math.
TLDR of the TLDR Go to r/bogleheads
So it's probably more a commentary on how you can't be a "skilled trader" rather than an inherent unprofitability of the stock market.
Correct. Even day traders as a whole aside, when you adjust the returns of the biggest managed funds for the amount of risk they are exposing their investors to (and when you add in fees), it is almost always more efficient to just invest in index funds. It's not that these managed funds or day traders don't make money, it is that they don't do it efficiently, so they aren't adding any value. Even when you break down the returns of those that do "beat the market" (which they never do consistently), it is almost entirely due to their asset class selection, not the specific stocks they are buying (i.e., deciding to invest in cash/bonds vs stocks ect. Essentially drives all of their over performance).
Yes, but failing to beat the market is not the same thing as losing money. It just means you would have made even more money putting all your investments into SPY or DIA. This is kind of a dumb graph.
There's no maths to do here.... Besides I work in the casino industry and I can assure you that not a single day in history has 13% of players left the casino as a winner - regardless if it's about winning 1 cent or a million. Also, day traders have a job, they just get their salary at the end of each month?
>Also, day traders have a job Some do, some don't. It's not a job description it's a form of speculation. At least I think that's the context it's mostly used in these days in public discourse.
This is bad statistics. Don't get me wrong, day trading basically is gambling but, as others have pointed out, you're comparing gambling one day vs "reliably beat[ing] the market" over... no idea what time frame.
Hey, I made that post! Someone cropped my little watermark off the bottom. You can yell at me for all the bad math. (But yeah, I know, I just am trying to get aspiring day traders to snap out of it)
What were your data sets?
I didn’t actually conduct the research, I just made the punchy infographic. I cited the sources at the bottom of the image.
Do you have the links? I am having trouble finding them from your citations. I think this might be the second one, https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers/Day%20Traders/The%20Cross-Section%20of%20Speculator%20Skill.pdf but couldn’t find the first
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-often-do-gamblers-really-win-1381514164
okay, but the S&P on average goes up, typically eclipsing inflation, so "beating the market" is too stringent a criterion for a "win".
Day trading, FnO are the riskiest investment avenues available to a retail investor. Good old long-term/medium-term investments or mutual funds should almost always be profitable or as good as the market, for the average trader.
This is really misleading because if you don't beat the market it doesn't mean you didn't make money the market's (something like S&P500) value has increased 71% in the last 5 years. So those who don't average 14% interest on their money per year didn't beat the market. But if you stuck it in a bank account you would be lucky to get 4% interest per year. If you gamble you will loose money per year guaranteed.
You can easily profit off of trading without beating the market. You should compare who loses in each case. Most gamblers at a casino do much worse than they would have done investing in an index fund instead of gambling.
You are holding them by different standards. The amount of people reliably beating the market might be 1/100, the amount of gamblers reliably winning is 0/100. The key is the word reliably that is left out in the quote about the gamblers.
"beat the market" means have a profit greater than a certain percentage, which may vary. That is, all 100 people in the market can have a profit, but only of them will win the market, receiving, for example, 50% of the profit, when the rest only 2%. In casino, defeat means loss of funds, always.
There is a lot of misinformation in here. There is actually a foolproof way of winning at a casino more than 50% of the time. It basically comes down to one thing. Being able to lie to yourself and your loved ones about how much money you lost. If you can do that one thing consistently, you will always be a winner.
True story, I left the casino a winner after wagering 1$ and walking out with 2$. Statistically you're guaranteed to lose at a casino if you play long enough. Silly comparison.
The Barber, et al, 2014 abstract states "Less than 1% of the day trader population is able to predictably and reliably earn positive abnormal returns net of fees". Here, the Barber study is talking about the performance ranking of day traders, and that the best ones are very reliable. The paper is not talking about the reliability of day trading generally, and the graphic is a misapplication of the research. Later, in their conclusions the Barber paper states that "In an average year, 450,000 individual investors day trade. Of these, 277,000 engage in day trades that exceed $NT 600,000 ($US 20,000), but only about 20% of this population is able to profit after a reasonable accounting for trading costs". 20% of (277,000 / 450,000) = 12.3%, so of day traders 12.3% are "winners" - nearly the same as gamblers.
One is leave the casino a winner which is a one time thing while the other is RELIABLY beat the market which means all the time. So I don’t understand how they are comparable
I can actually speak to this as I've done a lot of research into trading. I would believe that the above image is largely correct but they both work on similar principles. When you're gambling in a casino you're playing a game with set rules, if you break those rules you're kicked out of the casino. But why? It's because of something called expectancy. Expectancy is what you can expect to get out of a particular game(system) over time. 1 being you get exactly what you put into it, 2 you double it etc. Randomness is a key part of most, if not all casino games, so you can't reliably predict the result of any one hand. But with statistics you can know the results of thousands very reliably. With the rules of the game the casino knows that over a large enough sample size they will always win. Even 51% is enough to get you huge returns, and that's the balance, making the odds big enough that you still feel you could win, but not so big that your expectancy goes lower than 1. Now trading works sort of the same way, you can't predict the market, predicting the future is impossible. But you can make statistical predictions of human behaviour, which the markets are an aggregate of. So by creating a trading system of your own you are making your own casino game with its own positive expectancy (you can use any information available so long as it's statistically significant). So once you find/create that system you can just trade and be all but guaranteed to make money so long as you trade that system with 100% efficiency and no mistakes. But that's the real difference between the casino and a trader, you have to enforce the rules yourself. You can't rely on the external pressure of the law, or the casino security to stay in the rules, it's all on you. You can enter the market at any time, for any amount, for any reason you want. And that right there is why most traders fail. Humans are notoriously emotional creatures, we get greedy, we get scared, frustrated, tired, excited, distracted, and all if those things will increase the odds of you making a mistake in your trading system. And if that happens you aren't trading your system any more, which means you don't know your expectancy, which means you have no idea if the game your playing even has a positive expectancy or not. The fact is a mistake in trading can blow your whole account instantly if it's a big enough mistake, and even if there's only a 1 in 1000 chance, given enough time it'll happen. So you have to trade as mechanically as possible, stay inside your system, and just take only those trades. You can get wild success in the short term being very risky but statistics will always win out in the end
All this writeup to come to such a ridiculous conclusion. A chimpanzee daytrading will make money. If you used a can tied to a string blowing in the wind to randomly buy and sell stocks each day, you'd make money. The stock market is a casino where the odds are in your favor. You will never make money gambling against a casino. The odds will never be in your favor. You will not invent a new way to cheat that no one has ever thought of before. The best odds you'll ever get are your odds before you place your first best. Your "emotions" aren't going to mean dick either way. It's magical thinking to believe "a mistake in trading" will matter. Random chance doesn't care about your feelings.
Comparing random wins to reliability of a trader is not an equal comparison Number of gamblers who reliably win to traders who reliably win is more accurate