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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

It's an artificial distinction. If you are wealthy, you have access to opportunities with good odds, call it trading and tell everyone about it so they know you are a sophisticated and wise investor.

If you are poor, you have few good options and generally wouldn't brag about your gambling. If you do, you are labelled irresponsible.

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I tend to agree. Trading stocks is essentially gambling but almost worse. The odds are rigged but you don’t know by whom abs how much. It’s a game of skill, except not entirely. The house always wins except there are multiple houses and you can lose to all of them.

I think investing is a different beast: that is going long on a company, industry, or the market in general. You reasonably know that the market will over time go up. With specific industries or stocks you take a bit more risk but you are still buying ownership of a thing and things tend to become more expensive over time unless a better thing comes along. But short term gains chasing, especially as a retail investor is just gambling.

Stick a 1% tax on all share buys and use to reduce income tax for working people, or just issue it as a cheque at the end of the year that people can invest.

That doesn’t harm investing

Uh, that's a great idea, has this ever been proposed formally?

Financial transaction taxes have been introduced in any number of countries, the majority of which have ended up repealing them: the tax raised on transactions is outweighed by the loss of capital gains caused by a reduced number of transactions occurring. And in today's global financial system you could end up like Sweden, where introducing an FTT saw 80% of trading move to London within a year...

The Net Investment Tax is a better way and already exists. It taxes actual gains over a threshold so “the little guy” is unlikely to pay.

Sure it does. Any investment with an expected return of <1% immediately flips from positive value to negative value for an investor.

"That doesn’t harm investing"

Not true. The cost will be largely passed on from market maker to investor through bid offer spread.

> If you are poor, you have few good options and generally wouldn't brag about your gambling. If you do, you are labelled irresponsible.

And rightly so. For two main reasons

- demonstrably negative expected value of the bets (like in casino floor games or the lottery)

- relatively high proportion of total net worth wagered

I'm very comfortable with labeling this as irresponsible (regardless of levels of wealth). It's not just a case of "everyone does it but only poor people are shamed for it", there's a clear distinction between the two cases.

The more useful interpretation of the argument is that it's another form of justifying the social order through cultural perception of the inherent worth of people in each class

i.e. everything a wealthy person does thanks to wealth is traditionally promoted as a sign of their inherent worth, and everything a poor person does out of the conditions of poverty is interpreted as a sign of their fundamental roughness. This is especially true in a Protestant context of wealth being an indication of divine favor.

I don't think the odds is really part of the distinction. If you find a way to "gamble" with positive expectation, by profiting from sports betting markets for example, you are still labelled irresponsible and reckless compared to real "investors" who buy stocks, even when those bets are clearly unwise.

When you are poor, your discretionary investments are a small fraction of your future income. So you can afford to blow out your brokerage account a few times. In a way, college, marriage, and kids are leveraged bets on your future income so they are more risky than gambling past income.

When you are wealthy you have to be more disciplined and pace yourself. The only thing you thing that you can’t slow down the pace of is time.

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