After G2 winning IEM Cologne last Sunday I am really hyped for the next big CSGO tournament. On Wednesday a short tournament with all the top teams is happening in Saudi Arabia. Gamers8 with a prize pool of 1m is being played with 16 teams and the grand final is already on Sunday, some decent matches are coming up. The first match will be Apeks vs GamerLegion, where I am going with GamerLegion even though they are the underdog. The team played quite well in their last tournaments even beating Heroic in Paris. Cloud9 vs fnatic should be a clear win for Cloud9, even though they lost in the last tournament 2-1 against fnatic I think that they will come back stronger this time. The match of Heroic vs Flacons is probably the most one-sided match of the day and I don't see any chance of Falcons winning this one. The team doesn't have much experience playing against the Top CSGO clans in the world and will probably get knocked out very early. Vitality vs MIBR is going to be very similar, the Brazilians have a very new team that is not so used to be playing on such high levels and don't have a chance. The match Liquid vs ENCE is going to be much closer, but with reaching 2nd in Cologne I think ENCE is taking that one home. And in the last match NaVi vs Furia, I think that NaVi is going to win. Even with FalleN playing again I don't think the Brazilians are strong enough this year.

I don't think the term proud is a good word for it here, because gambling is some form of entertainment that we are doing in our spare time. Do you tell anybody about your habits and what you like to do in your free time? Personally, I think those topics are more for friends and family and not with strangers or colleagues. For me gambling is something like going out to a bar or the movies in an evening, I would talk about it with strangers if the topic comes up. But I wouldn't talk about it freely by my own choosing. The question I would always ask myself is, what benefit does it give me to tell me colleagues at work, or strangers I meet on the street that I gamble? I don't really see any benefit, because they could either think I am a rich guy who made a lot of money in gambling and only wants to brag and show off. Or they could have a negative opinion about gambling and this affects how they see me. I would recommend anybody to be open and honest about your gambling habits with close friends and family members, but don't advertise freely about it. You never know what kind of consequences there could be in the future.

There are two important things when it comes to relying on Bitcoin to bring food on the table, the first one is the main goal: we need to be profitable when trading and investing bitcoins. Even the biggest portfolio needs to grow to give us regular outflows. When starting out in the crypto world we need to have an initial portfolio we can trade with, a few hundred USD is not going to be enough to make returns that can pay our monthly living expenses. Anybody that wants to go into fulltime trading should calculate his minimum living expenses to know how much profit he needs to make each month, on top of that we also need to pay taxes on our profits. Only if we are sure that we can achieve these returns on a continuous basis we should go for relying on Bitcoins to provide food on the table. The second important thing is that we need to live in a country where Bitcoins are accepted and we can actually use it to make purchases. If bitcoins are not so popular in our country, we could still exchange them regularly for Fiat money and use that to pay our food supply. But the problem is that if Bitcoin drops or our local currency rises then we could be faced with much higher costs for our everyday purchases.

Copying a successful trader is a good start for any beginner. In case we have access to the trading strategies of experienced traders I would recommend anybody to take a look at them and implement them if it still makes sense. Blindly following a successful trader however is not going to work forever. Just because we make money in the first few months is no guarantee that we are going to keep making money of the strategies. The crypto markets are changing all the time and we need to keep reevaluating our positions and adjust them to new market conditions. How likely is it that the experienced trader will let us know when he closes down position? In case we pay the trader with a monthly subscription then I wouldn't worry so much, but if not I would be cautious. It could be devastating to be stuck in a trade that we should have closed out weeks ago. Getting inspirations for trading strategies is a good thing, just make sure you understand it and do some own research.

Sieht super aus die Platte, danke @Willi für ein weiteres Gewinnspiel.

Ich probiers mal wieder mit der 13.

13 - Mauser

Viel Glück an Alle.

   

While I agree with you that 2024 is important for the next period of the bitcoin market, I think we shouldn't be putting too much pressure on the BTC price to reach a certain level. Many investors have already spent the last 18 months to add to their Bitcoin holdings as they expect a price rise in 2024 due to the halving. Don't get me wrong, like you I am very optimistic for the next year and expect prices to rise. The problem is if many investors all expect the same thing, it can lead to a problem if the situation turns out differently. In case investors are using more money than they should and already rely on a big profit coming from Bitcoins next year, this could turn ugly very quickly. Even if the prices only rise moderately to 35-40,000 USD for example, investors could start selling their coins in large quantity to take the profit they need. Which would lead to large drops in prices. The long-term trend of Bitcoin is positive and it’s only a matter of time before we reach another ATH, just don't feel bad when your price target is not reached in 2024.

I really hope this is not going to be a new hyped olypmic format that receives a lot attention, because drugs are never a good thing and this will be bad for the athletes. Just because a drug has some performance enhancing benefits in the short term doesn't make it a good thing for the sport. We also should be focusing on the long term harm that such drugs have on the bodies of the athletes. Sure, it would be nice to see how much further the human body could go and what peak performance would look like if athletes use all the special substances, they can get their hands on. But what about the athletes after their professional careers? Some of these drugs might reduce the life expectancy of the athletes by many years which would be very sad. Another issue would be that once athletes start using these drugs, they could never compete in a normal tournament again as they would test positive for drugs. There would be competitions between two types of groups in the same sport and the viewers would have to choose what type they prefer. The same goes for the advertising companies, they would probably only focus on the tournaments with the most viewers and it could become a hard competition between drug using and non-drug using athletes. Would be nice to see a poll of how many people would prefer to see traditional athletes in sports and how many would watch the performance enhanced athletes.       

My personal experiences with gambling addictions are still very limited, and most things I know are either from the forum here or from news articles I read online. To me it seems a bit counterintuitive that only people that are winning can become addicted to gambling, I would expect that anybody is at risk, both winners and losers. I would even say that people that are losing many times are more at risk to become addicted. At least for me when I gamble, I already think about what I could do if I ever win big. So, it's not only winning itself, but also during gambling and losing that I would expect people to become hooked on the games. Reckless behaviour happens both after winning and losing, it's not a phenom that only happens to winners. The pressure is much higher after a losing streak, because our brain keeps telling us that we now deserve to win. It's like saying that after losing so many times in a row, that we are going to win now for sure.    

I don't think that education should play a role in wether someone should own bitcoin or not. Of course it's a good thing to fully understand crypto currencies and bitcoins before buying them, but even people that have no clue get advantages from owning bitcoins. Just compare it to stocks, I think everybody would agree that owning stocks makes sense for longterm investing. And even in the case when someone has no clue about stocks and the companies behind them, owning ETFs or investment funds is going to make a much better return than a savings account. The same holds true for owning bitcoins, the long term profit from bitcoins are visable and everybody can profit from them. The key to building resilient portfolios is to diversify in a large number of different assets, cryptos should definitely be a part of it.

There is a pretty easy explanation, most gambling addicts are men because most gamblers are men. Just enter a big casino and you will see that most customers are men, or watch one of the big poker tournaments on TV and you see only men playing. Here and there are also some female gamblers, but I would expect that 90% of the Poker players are men. During my visits to Las Vegas I noticed the most woman where at the slot machines. Based on that I would expect most gambling addicts to be male. There are also some additional facts like men are more common to go gambling alone, whereas woman tend to stay in groups. Which also means that woman are looking for a good time and want to socialize, whereas men focus more on gambling itself.

It's true that many of the so called investment gurus that publish a lot of trading books make most of their money being an author and public speaking, rather than being a successful trader. In my opinion this doesn't have to be a bad thing and just because we buy one book for 20 USD doesn't make us the sucker. It's always helpful to learn more about the author before buying his book, some successful authors worked as traders in their 20s&30s and only turned to writing books later in life. When it comes to financial literature there are three types of books. The first one is about financial history, they teach us how the past worked and what successful traders bought and sold to become rich. This is informative and can help if we see parallels today to the past, but we can't just copy the trades. The second category is technological and knowledge books that teach us how to do research and analysis of current trends. These are the best type of books as in my opinion as we can learn a lot from them and apply the techniques to various. The third type of financial books are investment recommendations that tell us exactly which assets to buy and sell. Here I would be very cautious and trust blindly on other people what to buy, it's better to make our own research and decisions.

That is a very optimistic approach and in a perfect world it would be a great thing to help everybody with giving them a talk about the consequences of their action and that their current path will likely lead to large financial losses. Unfortunately, we are not living in such a world, people are very reluctant to take advise from strangers and will probably not trust us, even if we are honest and only want to help. The difference between futures trading and gambling is the access to the two. Everybody who is 18 in my country can enter a casino and start gambling if they have the money, whereas starting to buy futures you need to setup a special account with the bank. I remember before being able to trade futures at my bank I had to fill out a questionnaire about my previous trading experience and my knowledge. Also, in a talk with the bank employee he showed me again that the losses from futures trading can be much higher than when trading stocks. So, there are special regulatory requirements for futures trading to protect people from themselves, in gambling such a thing doesn't exist. The problem is that futures trading usually involved leverage, which can lead to financial problems, in the casino we usually just gamble with our own money and if we lose it we have to stop. Having more protection for the customer is a good thing in futures trading, but in gambling there it’s not really necessary.

That is exactly the point why casinos need a lot of regular customers to make enough money to pay out the few large winnings. No casino in the world could afford if there was a gambler winning the jackpot every day. To pay out these large sums of money it takes a lot of people to pay money into the casino. The majority of gamblers will either make small wins or small losses, it's only a tiny fraction of people that are either winning or losing very big. The odds are in the favour of the casino, so the chances are slightly higher for the casino to have more losers than winners. Which also makes a problem for people to focus on a fixed winning amount, as we can't control our profit reliably. All we can do is keep on gambling or to stop, and focusing on specific amount will let us keep gambling until we reach that amount. The problem is that the longer we gamble the higher our chances to make a loss, and even when we recover our losses, we might not reach our profit target for the day. My recommendation is to focus more on the risk side instead of the profit side. We should keep in mind how much money we already gambled with on the day and not disregard everything only to reach a fixed profit.

That is a pretty good idea and I would also recommend you start looking for alternatives, in case there are no profits coming in any time soon. One year is probably the best time period, because of all the financial reporting also focuses on one year. If the business is only losing money, I would not keep adding new capital too it and rather try to change things. Maybe there is the possibility to reduce your capital and time investment tremendously and only let the business run at the side, without you worrying too much about it. The issue with failing businesses is that we don't only need to take the money you lose into account, but also the money you could have made doing something else. For example, as an employee you could have made 60k USD per year, then we need to add that to the loss we made in one year running our business. It might be hard to accept defeat, but it's better to stop now before the losses get out of hand. Also, we might be able to use all the previous work we put in for another project.   

I mean Bitcoins even dropped down to 16k USD from its ATH and most of us didn't sell last year. It was a great opportunity to buy new coins, unfortunately we only know afterwards where the bottom and the top is. Don't feel bad about missing out on selling at the top, it's nearly impossible to get the perfect timing right and good opportunities will always be around the corner. Instead of comparing todays BTC price to the ATH, we should look at the average price over the last few months. In that relation Bitcoin is doing fine around the 30k level and we still have the halving coming up next year leading to another boost in prices. Since you have been holding BTC for many years you should be doing very well with the current prices. Just look back a few years and your average purchase price is probably around the 10k USD level, so you must have already tripled your money today. Don't keep comparing to the highest possible price, this will only make you unhappy and is not realistic anyways. Stay strong and keep hodling, there will be new ATHs coming in the future.

Like you and the majority here on the forum I use 2-5% of monthly income for gambling activities. Having a fixed percentage of my income for gambling is the best risk management tool. With my fixed budget I can choose freely if I want to play poker, slots, other casino games or bet on sport matches. As long as I don't use more money on a monthly basis, I will add any unspent money to my next monthly basis. An important difference is that I try to preserve my winnings as much as possible. So, whenever I have a decent win I will take that money out and save. At least for me it's important to keep a difference between my monthly budget and how much I win. Especially in poker I try to keep building my bankroll to slowly move up the blinds. Without having a growing bankroll it's difficult to survive a losing streak. Now I am curious how anybody can use 30% of his income for gambling alone over a long period of time.

I always found the American dream a nice motivation for people to try and be successful. Working yourself up from a dish washer or the mail room to become a millionaire is one of the greatest success stories that shows everybody can make it. Unfortunately in my country we don't really have the goal of becoming rich, over here it's more about living a good and happy life. In my country there are two mottos that my parents and grandparents lived by. The first one is to save as much money as possible so you have a good life during retirement. Instead of treating yourself today and enjoying life, it's all about working hard and for planning down the road 30 years from now. The other saying is that there is an insurance for every risk. People are very risk averse and love to take out insurance for any possible situation. This again prevents you from enjoying life today, because you have to pay all the insurances. You can spend all your life paying premiums for worse case scenarios that never happen, just so that you sleep better. The big problem for me is that being afraid of risk also means that you won't invest your money and rather leave it at the bank in a savings account. That's why the goal of becoming a millionaire is not really an option.

When it comes to gambling, we should always know what we get ourselves into. All the casinos’ games standardised and we can research about them online. Everybody knows about the house edge in each game and when we choose our games for the night, we should make up our decisions also based on the expected values from each type of game. Based on these numbers we can already know what a potential loss should look like if we play a lot of hands. There isn't one strategy that we can follow that will let us win consistently and make us rich. Losing is part of the gambling games and we need to prepare ourselves for it. That is why it's so important to not use any money that we can't afford to lose. However, just because we are at a statistical disadvantage doesn't mean that we are going to lose all the time. Luck still plays a huge role in gambling and with it we could win the jackpot. The excitement of betting with real money is what brings all of us back to the tables and has so many generations before us. Regret is unfortunately also part of the life of a gambler and we need to remind ourselves that there is always a new game around the corner, feeling bad about past bets where we should have bet bigger is not really helpful.

The main benefit from gambling for me is to have something to do in the evenings. Especially during the hard time of covid lockdowns I was struggling to find something to do at home except for reading a book or playing video games. Twice I had to isolate myself for a week and couldn't do anything than watch TV at home, which got boring really fast. I am getting too old for most of the new video games and don't get the fun anymore from them to play for a long period of time. Going back to playing regular online poker was my main form of entertainment during that time and with that I also started playing other casino games regularly again. My friends had similar experience and all started visiting online casinos again. So, the main benefit for my male friends is to have entertainment from home while you can't leave your house. As for my female friends I don't know if they get any benefit from gambling, maybe a quiet night knowing that their husband is at home and don't have to worry about them. In general, the tax benefit from the gambling industry is probably what helps society at a whole the most.

AI is like the top selling point of 2023, all the major companies are jumping on the hype and are looking for ways to integrate it in their business models. It's good that trading companies are doing the same, but computer automated trading is nothing new, it's been around for a long period of time already. Maybe now with the sophisticated AI programs there are more options to find profitable strategies. My main concern is how reliable these strategies are and if they are going to persist or if its only a short term phenom. And still in any case we should at least try and find value on AI. For anybody that has the technological knowhow I would recommend to run at least a demo portfolio with AI based strategies.