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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

Stocks have positive expected returns: the risk premium. Sports bets have negative expected returns in aggregate and if you are good enough to only bet the ones you can spot with positive expected returns they ban you from the platform.

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Stocks do not have positive expected return. The return on the average stock is 0% in the US which is negative after fees (this is a common misconception, market returns are positive only because large companies get larger and this is contextual, when this isn't true then even the market will lose money). This is to say nothing of 0DTE options.

There is a risk premium but this premium can be positive or negative. It has been negative in many countries, do you suggest they ban stocks?

I don't think stocks are the same thing as gambling btw. But it is significantly more complex in that they overlap, some financial products clearly exist in the US because gambling was illegal. A sports bet is clearly not an investment, but neither is a ODTE option. Both are entertainment, the former probably more logically so than the latter, I am not sure what appeal that latter can have other than to gambling addicts.

If stocks did not have positive expected return no one would invest. What you're talking about is daytrading where there's a large failure rate so much so people call it gambling because of the nature of how swingy and illogical it can be.

Besides that, there's also the perspective that options help stabilize the market via hedging.

Then why do people gamble? Negative expected return, they still do it.

I am also not sure what you are saying. The return on the average stock is negative, it is a empirical fact.

No one should be buying 0DTE options, it’s idiotic.

You should only use options as a way to make some extra money for actions you might have taken anyway, such as buying/selling a stock at a certain price.

>they ban you from the platform

Use a respectable platform that doesn't do that then.

There's no such thing. The house always wins or the business collapses.

Yet, Polymarket exists where no one takes a cut* as it all happens on a blockchain.

*there are small gas fees for sending transactions on the blockchain

Are you familiar with any? I know people who bet on sports for a living and one of their biggest operational challenges is keeping accounts unbanned long enough to make consistent income.

Polymarket.

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