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Comment by stephen_greet | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is arguing here that the solution to combating institutional gambling via trading is not to allow retail investors to also gamble.

Should someone who has no idea what they're doing be able to leverage themselves up 100X to buy a call/sell option by pressing a few buttons in Robinhood because they read about YOLO stock on Wallstreetbets?

As someone who has lost a lot of money by following the Reddit sentiment on an investment, I think the author's point here is fair.

This is not to say I wasn't an idiot. I was. But at a hard time in my life I needed more money so I gambled big and lost big. I worry other people will fall into the same trap.

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It ruffles my feathers when I read that we should "combat institutional gambling via trading and not allow retail investors to gamble." Who died and made the author a moral decision-maker?

Is the problem that gambling is a 'sin' or is the problem that we're TRULY worried about people losing all their money and we want to protect them from themselves?

Do you want to put them in prison when they bet money on fantasy football or a poor person spends their paychecks on lottery tickets?

How far do you want to take this? FYI: states are moving to legalize gambling.

Irresponsible gambling costs the government money because we have safety nets. This applies to both institutions and individuals. The government needs to bail out banks and provide social welfare.

It's not a moral issue to me. Gambling through leveraged stocks should to be taxed more heavily to offset its cost. Something like the rate on lottery tickets.

That's a clear straw man argument, that there exists a sequence of events between people buying stocks on margin, going bankrupt, and living off of government assistance. And this occurrence is so commonplace as to warrant a proposed punitive tax on margin trade profit? What evidence do you have that this actually happens? I think you ARE making a moral argument, namely around 'risk taking' being something that society should punish and discourage via taxation. You left the second part, the societal cost (which may be real, who knows, you only offered a hypothetical government assistance scenario) completely in the realm of speculative fancy.

Not to mention, if you really truly wanted to morally punish and discourage gambling, I seriously doubt a tax on profit would make a dent in it! Have you ever met a real gambler?

> Gambling through leveraged stocks should to be taxed more heavily to offset its cost. Something like the rate on lottery tickets.

I agree with your initial point, but I don't believe this would actually help. People who are gambling typically don't look at the expected outcome and make "rational" decisions. Therefore, taking action that just modifes the expected outcome is unlikely to have any impact on the behaviour. People will still assume/hope that they will win, and if they win just a bit less, then so be it.

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