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>I almost doubled my (non-index) portfolio by making the most obvious plays ever (durr, airlines will probably go back up, casinos will probably go back up, cruise lines will probably go back up).

I would argue that these were not the "most obvious plays ever." Airlines were making most of their money from business travel. It wasn't necessarily foreseeable that business travel would rebound somewhat and that increased leisure travel would make up the rest of the difference.

Additionally, you should really compare your performance to how a baseline investment would have performed over the same time period. VT almost doubled from the the start of the pandemic to the market's peak, so it is not really fair to say that you traded your way into doubling your portfolio.

There were plenty of opportunities to lose money during that period.

Doubling your money is fucjing fantastic no matter how you slice it.

Let the guy have his win lmao

There was no opportunity to lose money if you diversified with an index fund or frankly even an actively managed fund. For every one of these guys their is another who lost money compared to the market.

People should not push the narrative that you can make money from stock picking when it's just not true in any practical way.

you're wrong about that

In the market that we’ve had these past few years, it’s reasonable performance.

Me, I just buy and hold on undervalued companies that make sausage machines rather than sausages, have been for a decade, and I’ve seen an overall gain of 38,000%. No leverage, as my strategy occasionally entails watching everything slowly decline 20% during from time to time — but I bought equities in businesses that I believed had legs at the time, and continue to do so for the same reason.

I'm actually surprised by the degree to which business travel has bounced back--especially given that in the tech sector anyway, a lot of companies are scrutinizing travel expenses very carefully.

Airlines are also weird in that at times they're more than willing to compete like crazy and eat brutal losses. And then suddenly not ...

I finally realized what the difference between gambling and investing was.

Gambling - mathematically, you're going to lose over time. This is why blackjack, the lottery, and sports betting are gambling. Every system that has payouts based on what people put in, minus a cut for the bookie, is in this category.

Investing - the mathematical odds are in your favor. Stocks, real estate, etc., as the payouts are based on the ongoing creation of value.

This is a prescriptive definition that doesn’t fully correspond to common usage patterns:

- Some sports bettors apply advanced analytics and win consistently. We can still sensibly use the expression ”sports gambling.”

- Conversely, people ”invest” in crypto schemes that are sure to lose

The conceptual distinction you’re drawing may be a useful one, but I don’t think it perfectly follows the contours of the words ”gambling” and ”investing.” These words are used in different contexts for random historical reasons. On average, the contexts in which we would say ”investing” are a lot safer than the contexts in we would say ”gambling,” but it’s not totally cut and dry.

I'm sure it's not a perfect delineation, the world is complicated. Nevertheless, it's still quite useful.

Blackjack as an example doesn’t work for the card counters that have +EV which can be had in a half day of reading / memorizing and $5k bankroll.

Technically, their investment EV is far higher than stocks and bonds. Could be on the order of 2% per day, if it wasn’t for those meddling back offs and limits.

The casinos know about card counters and throw them out. They also employ countermeasures:

1. limit the amount of bets

2. using multiple decks

3. reshuffling the decks long before the deck runs out

making the return so miniscule as to be a waste of time.

Casinos know about card counters but are unable to deal with them effectively just like people dealing with social engineers.

1. Bet sizes can be up to around ~$10k with a 1% - 3% EV per hand.

2. Doesn't matter too much, standard 6 or 8 deck shoes still are 0.5% EV at true count 2 and +0.5% thereafter.

3. This matters more, but most counters eye dealers with 70%+ penetration of all the decks, which still averages to the +EV above.

Returns are ~$50/hr at your average casino but the sky is the limit for having mid 6 figure bankroll and being a smooth social engineer with $5k bets at high roller tables. Some hands are +$50-$250 per.

I thought blackjack bets were limited to $500. Seems my information is outdated. Nice to hear some better info!

So what do you classify poker as?

Gambling? There's no house in poker (cept for the fees for the dealer, which i would assume is fixed).

Good question! For most people (myself included) it's a zero-sum game of luck, and a loser if the house takes a cut.

For some people who dedicate their lives to it, it's a game of skill, and an investment when played against lesser mortals.

If you're betting on the players in the game, then it's clearly gambling.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3189/pg3189-images.html...

> As his gains swelled, so did his spending on everything from sports betting and bars to luxury cars.

The sports betting wasn't part of his investing strategy. This feels like a "No True Scotsman" fallacy to say these people aren't really investors.

> (durr, airlines will probably go back up, casinos will probably go back up, cruise lines will probably go back up).

Don't forget the mother of all obvious plays.

"Maybe crude oil's true price is higher than -$40 per barrel" (yes, negative dollars).

EDIT: To be fair, oil traders got burned in the short term by calling the bottom at $10, $5, $0, -$5, -$10, or -$20. Showing the complications around "calling the bottom". Yes, it turns out, that the price of oil can collapse to spectacularly low values. Still, the price of oil did in fact recover above these levels, so buying oil at any of these entry points would have netted easy wins over the next couple of years.

He was making sport bets with the money he made from trading. The article doesn't use this to illustrate his trading strategy, but rather explain how he lost the money he made.

> not the frenzy of bullish rallies.

One maxim I heard: in a bull market, the less you know, the more you make.

I don't understand this comment. Do you have a problem with the terminology? Or with those investors in particular or with how they actually made their money or... ? To me it reads sort of like gatekeeping on who should have access to the market based on the lack of trading 'system' or whatever that means. Reminds me of the hedgies touting about the 'fundamentals' during the GME saga.

Not OP, but it is incorrect terminology. An investor is someone who buys with the intention to hold and expects to generate income or capital appreciation. Investors care about the fundamentals and the long-term outcome.

These case studies are all people that jumped in and tried to make a short-term profit off of market trends. This is very risky and akin to gambling; the formal terminology though is speculator, not investor.

> An investor is someone who buys with the intention to hold and expects to generate income or capital appreciation. Investors care about the fundamentals and the long-term outcome.

Agree to disagree. An investor is someone who buys into financial vehicles with the intent of making more money. That's it. There are different types of investors but how they actually do it is an 'implementation detail'. You can be an investor and a speculator at the same time. While you're hold the stock, you can proxy vote, you can sell the stock, you're by definition an investor.

EDIT: What does the IRS consider you an investor if you made money from stocks? Or do they check to see if you're interested in 'the fundamentals' first? Do they investment income and expenses like capital gains and such to be 'investment' incomes or 'speculation' incomes depending on your 'system' of investments? Asking for a friend to check if they'd get a tax break because they weren't real investors.

By that definition, as long as some people visit Las Vegas and play the slots with the intention of making money (as opposed to playing for fun), they too can be considered "investors".

If we broaden the definition of "investor" as much as you're describing, the word becomes meaningless. It's important to distinguish between "investors" and "speculators", and this is how we do so.

> By that definition, as long as some people visit Las Vegas and play the slots with the intention of making money (as opposed to playing for fun), they too can be considered "investors".

No, because the casino does not sell securities (re-read my comment, please). You're conflating how the market behaves (or how specific stock behaves) vs the market itself. Ask the tax man, does money from casinos get taxed differently than capital gains from stock sells? Why is that?

> If we broaden the definition of "investor"

I'm not broadening anything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor

I see your Wikipedia quote and raise you one from BankRate:

"Investors take a systematic approach to growing their wealth, buying assets with reasonable levels of risk in exchange for long-term growth. Speculators, on the other hand, buy assets that may experience rapid growth but can also lose their entire value if they go out of favor... Popular assets such as stocks and bonds can be investments or speculative assets, depending on how you approach them." [1]

> An investor is someone who buys into financial vehicles with the intent of making more money.

OK, fair enough, you did say "buys into financial vehicles", which excludes playing the slots. Regardless, and if for no other reason than to debate with a shared vocabulary, I still contend that it's important to distinguish between someone who takes calculated risks based on thorough research and industry knowledge vs. someone who does the Wall Street equivalent of "playing a hot tip at the race track".

If you agree with that, how do you propose we do that, if not with different terms for different concepts? And if you don't agree that the distinction is important, how do you propose that someone looking for a money manager make their criteria clear to others?

EDIT: I wouldn't base your opinion of who is or isn't an investor on what the IRS says. This is the same organization which said that buying a clarinet for your child is a medical expense, after an orthodontist argued that playing it helped correct their kid's overbite. [2]

1. https://www.bankrate.com/investing/investing-vs-speculating

2. https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/tax-deductions-and-cred...

> I still contend that it's important to distinguish between someone who takes calculated risks based on thorough research and industry knowledge vs. someone who does the Wall Street equivalent of "playing a hot tip at the race track"

I don't know, is it important to make that distinction? What's so special about this? Is this some sort of protected guild? How do you distinguish between someone who went to college, majored in CS, writes protocol-level code professionally and holds 10 patents vs someone who went to a bootcamp, copy-pastes code from the internet while working in a web shop writing PHP extensions for wordpress?

> I wouldn't base your opinion of who is or isn't an investor on what the IRS says. This is the same organization which said that buying a clarinet for your child is a medical expense, after an orthodontist argued that playing it helped correct their kid's overbite.

I don't see the problem with that. Another instance of something similar is the health benefits from playing the Didgeridoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didgeridoo.

> I don't know, is it important to make that distinction?

Again, it is if you're interviewing a money manager. And that's basically what you're doing when you're judging a stock tip, whether from /r/WallStreetBets or anywhere else. That's not to say that professional investors don't post on Reddit. But so do a lot of idiots who talk a good game. My bet is that there's more of the latter than the former.

If you wouldn't give equal credence to the software opinions of your two hypothetical examples, then you shouldn't do so with the investing opinions of my two examples. I'd sooner trust the advice of people with more knowledge vs. those with less. I'm not sure why that idea is such a tough sell for you.

Obviously, feel free to do what you want with your money. I know which of the two people I'm trusting with mine. The market will tell us who was right in the long run.

Not disagreeing with what you're saying. But if interviewing money managers, I care very little about:

- how they're calling themselves (investors vs traders vs speculators vs etc..) - how other people are calling them (investors vs traders vs speculators vs etc..) - whether or not some group of people considers them true 'investors'.

I'm talking (and have been talking) about the terminology here.

> I'd sooner trust the advice of people with more knowledge vs. those with less.

Again, please re-read my comments. Your text has nothing to do with what I said. When I said it's not important to make the distinction I was referring solely to the terminology.

> When I said it's not important to make the distinction I was referring solely to the terminology.

I mean, it's important in the sense that it's generally useful to be able to differentiate two things that are, in fact, different from each other?

When I order orange juice with my brunch, I don't want the waiter to come back with apple juice. When I ask my general practitioner to recommend a good oncologist, I don't want them to refer me to an ophthalmologist. Why would this be any different?

Things mean things. To the extent that we blur the lines of our shared vocabulary, we make it harder to communicate with each other. Maybe you've never needed to distinguish between these two very different concepts, but lots of other people have.

The IRS also distinguishes between short-term and long-term gains.

Long-term gains (more than one year) get a discounted tax rate.

Short-term gains, which are most likely speculative, are taxed as ordinary income... the same rate as winnings from gambling.

People are right to be cynical and critical of the GME fundamentals. It's a meme, not an investment.

People are right to be cynical and critical of GME fundamentals but not all investing is fundamentals based.

it can be both a meme and an investment. If someone buys GME, while they hold the stock, they're by definition an investor.

That's like saying you're an investor at the table as long as the roulette ball is still moving.

So you're saying that the market is like a casino? Fair enough, then. But no, you're an investor as long as you have money on the table.

No, I'm saying that GME is like a casino. That was an extremely lame attempt at an assumptive close.

It doesn't change semantics and if GME is like a casino, GME is not in isolation, it's part of the market. This says more about the market than about GME, tbh.

And as long as you hold the stock, from the tax man's perspective, from the company's perspective, from your trading platform's perspective, you're an investor. It's irrelevant how long you had the stock. If you sell it, you're going to pay taxes on the profit from your 'investment', which makes you an investor.

No, in fact, not all listed products in the market are equivalent.

For decades the federal government's management of the market rules have paralleled state government's management of lotteries.. There's a definite risk of bubbles dragging a whole bunch of people into a "sure thing" period which then has to unwind like any other pyramid scheme. Hence the headline.