Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Would you say those same people who just learned the phrase “short” or “short squeeze” are likely the same kind of people going to the casino and thinking they can successfully count cards?

As mentioned elsewhere in here, it’s ultimately gambling. It’s putting money up, exposing it to risk that could completely wipe you out. If someone doesn’t understand that about stock investing, I think they’re very similar to someone not realizing a casino could wipe out your money. But making sure everyone fully understands this - educating people who are risking money - certainly seems like a thoughtful thing for countries to incentivize.

But unless all the financial websites have to be styled to look like a casino, or areas of a physical bank space put up neon lights and blinking signs to emulate Vegas casinos, I don’t know if we can ever drive the point home clearly enough.

Yeah, I agree it's totally gambling.

There's also the thing where buying equity in a company can seem very simple because you see something like Apple where they made a cool thing and obviously their stock went up. People just have no idea about how complex the markets are.

They also don't remember the very smart people who claimed the Iphone would be quickly overtaken by Android and other cheaper alternatives (Clay Christensen predicted this a guy generally very smart on tech/business)

Hindsight always makes it seem like it was easy to pick the great companies that were OBVIOUSLY going to do well.

They don't understand how incredibly sophisticated professional investors are who dedicate their lives to it, and on average even THOSE people don't 'beat the market'.

But people should be allowed the freedom to choose to gamble. Even if it's bad for them - as long as they own the responsibility, and not create a burden on soceity for doing so.

RobinHood is styled like a gambling app. That doesn't put people off; more the reverse.

Bit of a tangent, but: it’s absolutely possible to learn a relatively simple card-counting system and play with positive expected value in a casino. You can easily run simulations to prove this.

I think this reinforces the GPs point. It's not all that hard to learn some basic card counting but probably 99% of people who try it casually end up playing a -EV game, due to the fact that the edge is very small and requires practicing/playing with much more discipline than most people want to bother with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com