A lot of young people are into stocks, trading, all that junk. My belief is these people are effectively playing a complex gambling game. There is an extra dimension to stocks that gambling lacks, which is it's perception. It is socially acceptable, and moreover it has an intellectual veneer. Success in stocks is attributed to intellectual prowess (but failure? mere bad luck!), so we can see there is an element of affirming your intellect here.

It's absurd that anyone should consider themselves capable of predicting the behavior of this massively complex nonlinear system though. I'm not talking about when somebody puts some money into a new company developing some promising product for long-term gain. I'm talking about the day trader speculating second-by-second. How many hours goes into learning, research, memorizing 'candlestick' patterns and such? What are the net balance of the average person doing this divided by how many hours they sunk into this? How does it compare to getting off your arse and working?

What I really don't get is the participation of the working class in trading. When it comes to speculative money games, they are best left to people who can absorb the risk. Remember one trillion dollars in the US lost because of the release of Deepseek? But all that happened was some headlines came out; the cause was entirely spectacular, and I've not heard of "Deepseek" since then. How could anyone who isn't already loaded bear to stick their money into such a system?

I invest into things I use. Anything else and it's just a pure guessing game not based on experience or obvious research
I bought Nvidia a year or so ago because I have a Nvidia graphics card and got something out of it later, for example.

I can't speak for professional traders, but basically day trading is very hard and requires actual skill unless you find a penny stock which jumps up and down predictably every day. Most normal people just invest in indexes, such as the S&P500, which basically tracks the top 500 stocks in the USA meaning that over time, it is extremely likely to go up (in the long run). Some single stocks are also good investments, such as Atos (ATOS SE EURONEXT, "https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/FR001400X2S4-XPAR"), which I invested 2000 Euros in, and it has tripled since the start of the year. I know this by looking at its history, the fact that it is backed by the french government, has had a massive devaluation, etc, meaning that it will most likely go up a lot in the next few years.

TLDR; Invest in the long term, unless you have a lot of skill and experience and have studied trading, in which case you could do some day trading.

One issue I have with the stock market is that it is unethical in many cases if you ask me.

>One issue I have with the stock market is that it is unethical in many cases if you ask me.

How is it unethical?

>>51987
Expectancy == RewardRiskRatioWinOdds - WinOdds + 1
or RewardWinOdds - Risk*( 1 - WinOdds )

If returns are normally distributed (on small durations they basically are), then Expectancy should be zero. This is without accounting for any transaction fees or bid-ask spread. Transaction fees bump up your Risk/bump down your RewardRiskRatio a little bit, and spreads bump down WinOdds a little bit (you buy the ask and sell the bid), both which will move Expectancy negative off zero. So yes, it is like a casino game.

Options contracts are priced the same way theoretically. The Black-Scholes-Merton price of an option with any given strike, volatility, and expiration, is the price needed to, when combined with the option's odds of expiring In The Money, results in a zero Expectancy. Again, add transaction fees and spread, and also add in an inherent inefficiency against debit positions/in favor of credit positions, due to uncertainty of future volatility: the volatility smile.

Now here's where Casinos CBOE, NYSE, and NASDAQ beat out all the other flashing blingbling flimflam Vegas houses: portfolio positions are not independent of each other, and with good macro and fundamental analysis combined with the asymmetry gamma gives debit options positions, in a risk controlled manner, you can actually skill up enough at the game to see fairly consistent wins.

I advise anyone who doesn't want to die poor to search out the magnet links to the following Institute of Trading and Portfolio Management's courses:
IPLT + PTM v2 (Introduction to Professional Level Trading,
............. Professional Trading Masterclass),
POTM (Professional Options Trading Masterclass),
PFTM (Professional Forex Trading Masturclass) .

Anton is not a Tim Sykes clown, he is ex-Goldman and ex-Lehman. His institution's courses and mentoring programs run on the order of $10K-$15K, I don't recommend you spend that kind of dough until you prove it all out; make a fat stack THEN pay him his dues for saving your ass from poverty.

I would open and leave unfunded a Schwab account for ThinkOrSwim, specifically the Paper Trading feature. When you have the account opened and ToS set up, get on the phone with Schwab to get everything enabled (options, futures, forex, realtime data) for paper trading. Anton explicitly advises against simulated accounts, but I think it's a good first step to prove out if you are even remotely ready to put cash behind your gamepla... err trading, IFF you treat it like real money, feel the losses in your gut like it was real cash, and don't hit reset every time you eat paper losses.

THERE IS NO TRADING FOR INCOME IF YOU HAVE UNDER $5MM!!! You probably need about $50K/yr to live comfortably, and that is 1% of $5MM. You never ever withdraw from your accounts if your balances total under a few million, and once you hit total balances exceeding 100x your yearly living needs only then do you take out a 1% per annum management fee to feed yourself. Before that point, don't quit your day job!

I FUCKING HATE in-band formatting text. Pure cancer. Admin, an asterisk is an asterisk and not a fucking formatting character! If you need formatting, open Microsoft Word and post your replies as attachments!

>>51987
Expectancy == RewardRiskRatio*WinOdds - WinOdds + 1
or Reward*WinOdds - Risk*( 1 - WinOdds )

the only trading i know how to do is through cashapp. how can i get into the big boy leagues?

>>52117
>How do I ...

See >>52100 for your best long-term chances at it.

Lose big, win nothing.

That's stocks, and even if you do get money from stocks, good fucking luck trying to reinvest that into stocks again, if you gain a penny from stock trading because you did ""good"", then keep it and move on.

Stock markets are the equivalent of "Trust the bank for increased money rate"

If you trade the stock market you are basically donating to institutional traders.

"75 - 98% of every amateur trader lose all their capital during their first year of trading, depending on who you ask."
https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-do-the-average-traders-lose-in-their-first-year-of-stock-market-day-trading-What-are-some-tips-that-will-help-them-not-lose-so-much-money-and-stay-in-the-game-longer/answer/Lars-Klette-1

The big trading brokerages all have fiber ran underground that connects them to the stock exchange servers. A lot of brokerages connect to one of a number of "Latency Equalized Hubs" which are datacenters that equalize their latency to the exchange servers by using large spools of fiber cable that data runs through to artificially increase the delay.
https://cdn.cboe.com/resources/membership/Cboe_LE.pdf

If you don't have a connection at all to one of these datacenters, get fucked. If trading a high volume stock your donation will be gobbled up 5 different ways by the time you see a trade confirmation.

There, I just saved you a bunch of money. Invest in yourself instead.

>>52393
nvm guys, I have had a change of heart. This is real. I just made 100k on nvidia margins, I feel like I'm on top of the world. I just exited all positions and am taking a vacation to the bahamas. You can do it too!

Nobody mentioned this, but I recently learned that every bank in the world holds USD reserves and USA is going further into debt every year.

How long until this bubble bursts and there is another great depression?

How bad will it be?

as bad it as it was last time, but with memes and niggers

>>52468
Every bank in the worlds holds a variety of currencies as reserve. If there is a big crash it would be very bad, but if the USD just devaluates slowly banks will just sell their USD assets for something more stable.