Hacker News Reader

I don't know if you can differentiate between gambling and investing in real life. Both activities involve making bets with certain payoff and certain probability in mind.

It's often really difficult to know the actual risk you were exposed to and whether your probability assessments were reasonably accurate.

View on HN

I'm sure that you can somehow differentiate between investing in government bonds and "investing" in forex.

Maybe there is no sharp distinction between one and the other but I think there is a spectrum of actions between investing and gambling.

I agree with you that there is a spectrum of risk taking from gambling to investing. Nevertheless both involve taking risk and expecting payoff sometime in the future. Both the estimate of risk and estimate of payoff could be wrong or could change dynamically. I wouldn't be surprised if some argue that US government bonds are more risky than investing a diversified portfolio of forex today.

I guess you could equate them by saying investing in government bonds is like betting on a team paying $1.01 to win. The odds are vastly in your favour to gain from the investment but it's not certain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com