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My version of the OED defines gambling as "to play for money, especially for
high stakes; to engage in wild financial speculations: to take great risks
for the sake of possible advantage."
I imagine that the vast majority of people on RT think of themselves as
traders, or novice traders wanting to learn to do the job successfully. The
thing that they do not want to do is gamble. They want to learn how the
market(s) move and how they can trade, with a good possibility of making
money. They want to risk the least amount of money in order to make the
most they can. Simple enough concept! So what, in gamblers' parlance, are
the odds of them being successful in this endeavour?
Let us leave that as a rhetorical question, because no one has the answer
anyway - just their opinion, which, of course, for most people is what the
market is all about. Opinions and their influences are very much a part of
trading and probably cause of more losses than anything else.
It seems to me that the further away you are from the leading edge of the
market, the more you are at the mercy of opinions and the affects of other
people's actions as they impact the market. At the leading edge, the price
action is showing you what it is currently doing and, according to other
factors of support or resistance or retracements or other known constituents
within that market, at that time, you are able to make a decision on whether
to buy or sell or sit on the side.
If you position trade, there are many indicators and systems to use and
there are the impacts from Reports, Government policies, et al, that can and
will influence your trading. It seems to me that in those circumstance
there is much more of a gamble about what the market will do, because there
is much more time for it to happen in. To make you feel worse, the
indicator or wiggly wave is always right after the event, but cannot tell
you before it has happened, what is going to happen. There are, to me, too
many things to gamble with...
At the very sharp end, there are no indicators to give you more information
than the price itself. There is no time for opinions. There is no system
that can do more than you can do seeing the price action as it happens in
front of you. If you take action in accordance with what you see and in a
manner which allows you to be wrong more times than you are right and still
have the odds in your favour, then I think you start being a trader and not
a gambler.
Best of trading
Bill Eykyn
www.t-bondtrader.com
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