Is there a hard threshold? Do high risk investments such as penny stocks qualify as gambling? Do low risk investments? Annuities? Bonds? CDs?
This comment got me wondering.
Is it more to do with the venue? Stock markets and real estate vs casinos and the lottery?
Were the MIT Blackjack Team gambling or investing?
Is this just another semantic hotdogs are sandwiches discussion or is there an agreed threshold?
Any time you spend money on the chance to make money, it’s gambling, IMO.
Lottery ticket? Gambling. Buying stock? Gambling. Sports betting? Buying into a poker game? Believe it or not, gambling (which is the only gambling I’ll personally do since the game is still enjoyable even if I lose).
"Gambling " is so meaningless in this context.
I gamble with my life when I drive to the shops.
When you put your money in the bank, theres’ a chance you’ll make some interest, there’s a chance you’ll make a little more interest. Does that make it gambling?
Every day I wake up I gamble if I’ll enjoy it or not.
Spreading out stock purchases across the market guarantees returns over the long run.
Buying one stock is gambling, buying a wide spread of stocks (or an index fund that does so) and holding them for years is investing.
I agree in principle, but technically it’s really just very low risk.
Buying into a total market index fund at 90yo could be considered high risk since it’s not unlikely for the market to go down with no time for you to recover.
But does that make it gambling?
Inflation exists, you’re gambling every day on whether or not your money has the same value tomorrow, or even any value at all. Like you said, this conversation can easily break down into semantics.
diversification is a proven investment strategy to minimize risk versus expected reward. the goal of investing is to try to achieve financial goals while minimizing exposure to losses. gambling generally doesn’t use goals or risk assessment or loss minimizing strategies. but im sure you could come up with definitions that blur this stuff.
The key phrase is ‘over the long run’ and ‘holding them for years’. That 90yo wants to have long-ago moved their investments into bonds because, as you point out, a stock market downturn may not come back up before they die. Waiting out a downturn takes years and they are drawing down on their investments regularly.
Spreading out stock purchases across the market guarantees returns over the long run.
No it doesn’t.
Lol.
Buying one lottery ticket is gambling. Buying 1,000 different lottery tickets is investing. Got it.
Unironically yes.
If you can expect your money back on buying thousands of lottery tickets, you are making an investment.
Buying enough lottery tickets to guarantee a payout just ensures you lose money as the house always takes a cut. Investing, unlike the lottery, has the benefit of not being a zero sum game. There is wealth generated and buying something like an index fund and holding for years puts you in the group making a profit along with everyone else.
Example: If you bought VTI (an index fund) just before the 2008 crash (and subsequently lost a bunch of value during the crash), you would still be up 257% today. And that isn’t some outladish example; do the same with the S&P 500 and you are up 279% today. Purchasing for the long term and with a wide array of stocks is investing.
Edit: And in both of those examples you would be earning dividends the entire time as well, which is not part of the quoted %.
Buying enough lottery tickets to guarantee a payout just ensures you lose money as the house always takes a cut.
It depends. When there is no winner the earnings roll over which means you can make money. People have made millions buying thousands of tickets so they put rules in to stop it.
It’s technically not a guarantee, it is certainly possible for the entire market to take a dump at once. Over the long term – decades – it has been profitable to invest in the US stock market even counting these downturns. Like they say in all the stock prospectuses, though, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Still, I’ll take my chances with the market. At least if it goes to zero, I’ll have a lot of company at the homeless shelter.
And this assumes the line will always trend up. Forever. Which we don’t know if it will or not.
We can’t know for sure, but its historically been the case. In addition, the expectation for infinite growth stems a lot from continued research and development. We continue to make processes more efficient making products cheaper and easier for more people to buy. You can say that the econmy will stop growing at some point, but we just don’t know when that may happen.
These are the kind of replies that make Lemmy great.
Low risk ≠ No risk
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
So emojis like this are the internet equivalent of the cockney rhyming slang, innit? I immediately translated that, but someone, in one hundred years with no knowledge of 2020s meme culture will think it’s complete gibberish.
Can confirm. I am from the year 2124, and I do not understand the meaning of this message.
If its fun or get rich quick. Gambling.
If it’s some boring thing some adviser told you that you are sick of, that you then told your family and they are sick of it. You just going to leave it and forget about it. Then it’s investing.
IMO: When you do it for the entertainment/feeling/rush, it’s gambling. When you do it for the returns, it is investing. I also think the other poster that mentioned investing as being interested in the success of the endeavor, that would exclude shorting and I think might be a useful distinction.
Casino games and sports betting all have lower expected value (probabilistic value) than their cost, so they are not something you can do for returns (you have better expected returns by not participating).
There are plenty of people that are misinformed, dishonest, or stuck finding a bigger fool that will sell you a gamble by calling it an investment, and expected value is not guaranteed value.
If you’re talking about stock picking, hard disagree. Emotion has nothing to do with it whether or not it’s gambling.
If picking stocks was anything but a gamble portfolio managers wouldn’t have such a god awful track record.
Just because you are wrong about your expected value calculations (or were right but the actual return was on the lower end of the range) and have made a bad investment doesn’t change the fact that it was an investment because you were doing it for the returns.
In short, performance doesn’t matter for this distinction, at least IMO.
You can dress it up in whatever language you want but when nobody is able to consistently beat the market it looks a hell of a lot like gambling.
The DJIA (e.g.) isn’t “the house”. It isn’t something you are competing with in that your losses are its/their gain. You are misunderstanding both investing (in general and the stock market specifically) and gambling when you make that confusion/analogy.
Not beating the market but having positive returns is only “losing” when infinite exponential growth is the goal. Beating the market but having negative returns is not “winning”.
I’d argue investing is gambling with varying degrees of risk depending on what what you are putting your money into. Even if that risk is very low there is always a chance something crazy happens and you lose everything.
Ultimately it gets to the point of, is the risk higher than the risk of money in a bank account.
Given that (at least in the us) money sitting in a checking account is 100% risk with guaranteed negative returns (over time inflation will outpace interest), there are investments that can generally be considered safer (bonds, tbills, etc) than just holding dollar bills.
When you can’t afford to lose what you “invested”
Well, investing is technically always a gamble including buying assets like a house or gold. A better question would be “When does gambling become investing” and in my opinion that’s when the expected return is positive.
Expected return for most crypto is negative, some are positive but they’re always a gamble.
MIT team took an approach that has guaranteed success if played enough times by using math. It’s not gambling, just playing a game.
Stock markets are always a gamble and investment, but buying index fund stock is less of a gamble than selecting individual stock because it’s less risk.
Another question to ask is “when does a gamble stop being a gamble?” and that’s broadly when the potential downside is very unlikely. Think buying treasury bonds, housing after housing crash, stocks after stock crash etc.
People also have very different views on “What is very unlikely to go down” so depending on who you ask stock, crypto and real estate can all be both gamble and not depending on which person is looking at it.
Always has been, just has better PR
Agreed, every investment has at least some kind of risk.
Neat question. Hotdogs are sandwiches imo.
That said, some types of investment provide additional advantages over simply appreciating in value. A stock can pay dividends, a house can be lived in, stuff like that. Could probably draw a distinction there. Additionally, some investments are guaranteed, like a savings bond. Could probably draw another there.
If I had to draw some clean line somewhere, I’d probably try define gambling as situations where you’re not intended to be able to “win money” on average, where investments are. The line is drawn via intention though, not anything quantitative. So, pretty inherently fuzzy.
Cube theory clearly established that hot dogs are tacos. It’s all based on the location of structural starches.
It’s always a gamble. What matters if it’s high risk or low risk. If you put it straight in a bank, I guess you’re gambling the entire economy isn’t going to be in shambles. If you’re gambling in companies, you’re gambling they’re gonna be successful.
And if the market collapses your money is useless anyway
Well there are still physical things. There’s gold, silver, precious metals, property, food, water, etc.
It’s subjective… what does “gambling” mean?
Any thing you do has an element of risk, so you could say it’s a gamble.
A lot of insurance investment came from gambling, so the line is kind of fuzzy.
I would like at it as trying to describe your investment strategy in terms of trying to maximize total expected value and giving yourself enough chances to get close to that expected value.
Investors hedge their risk, gamblers bet on it.
In my opinion the shortest answer to this would be: When you go from index funds to individual stocks
When it’s not government bonds.
Any investment can be seen as a “bet”, the difference comes from the conditions out of which the return comes. Does it come out of a business’s operations, or a piece of some other source of income? Then even a high-risk investment is still an investment. Even an investment in an asset which is expected to appreciate in the future is still an investment, as long as that appreciation is based on something tangible. Walt Disney bought up a lot of useless real estate in the Florida Swamp, but had a plan as to how to make the investment pay off.
A gamble will have nothing concrete backing it, it will just be down to chance. Like betting on Red at Roulette. Or going to FanDuel and betting that Pete Alonso will hit a home run in tonight’s game. Those odds are made by professional bookmakers to make the chances as close to 50/50 (minus the sports book’s vig) as they can.
Basically, a gamble is up to random chance, an investment can be backed by a business case. But there are aspects of risk to both.
