Do you consider a competent poker player a "gambler"? If yes, I'm okay with calling the act of trading that as well: both are (risk controlled) finite resource bets on a stochastic process, based on the limited ability to predict future outcomes of that process.
If, on the other hand, a competent poker player is
not a gambler, while a trader is, I would like to hear what makes predictions of the 'poker' process different from predictions of the 'market' process. Or, if both of them are gamblers, but neither of them has a chance to be EV+ in your view, then I'd like to see an explanation of why a competent poker player beats an incompetent time after time, (almost) independent of the cards that have been dealt. Been there myself, lost some money in the process
Poker is not a pure game of chance in the same way that a slot machine is a pure game of chance. (I've added enough disclaimers about cheating in prior posts, so mentally insert them where appropriate)
I don't know exactly what mechanism makes trading a game of pure chance, but the evidence shows that it must be.
The first way we know is that because if a strategy existed which consistently resulted in EV+, then one single entity could follow it and eventually own the entire market, at which point it's no longer market. Markets continue to exist, therefore no EV+ strategy exists.
The other way we know it's a game of pure chance is because when enough data is collected on the lifetime behavior of all traders, the results are consistent with playing a game of chance, with about the number of outliers one would expect given the sample size (every once in a while 20 random coin flips will come up all heads in a row).
Poll
