Is day trading gambling when i first started day trading seven years ago, i was definitely gambling with the rise of retail trading and investing in 2020 to 2021. You've probably seen plenty of articles and wall street bed reddit posts showing some outrageous profits from retail traders. Many of whom lost their job and decided to put the stimulus checks into the market. Well, many people find these gains or attendees very impressive.

There are also many who call this gambling as a profitable day trader who's been in this business for more than 7 years. Now i've been called a gambler by people online and in real life, who have either never placed a trade themselves or just gave up on trading all together. But i do agree, there's a definite fine line between trading professionally as a business and just blindly gambling your money away, and that's what we're talking about today in this video. What are the key differences between gambling and trading? This is a topic inspired by this article.

On trading view, called traders versus gamblers know the key difference. I'm going to explain in even more detail and adding my own personal stories here, because let me be the first to admit when i first started day trading seven years ago. I was definitely gambling and that's why i want to share with you today the key principles and steps that have enabled me and many other profitable full-time traders. I know to eventually make the shift from gambling to becoming consistently profitable over time, so stop going into the market and just press the buy button and gamble your money away.

Consider pressing the like button instead like so it's free and won't cost you to lose money. I want to start off saying that most traders, myself included, started out treating day trading as gambling. It's almost like a rite of passage when i first started out day trading, i wanted to get rich quickly. I thought this was going to be easy money and i could turn 1 000 into a million in six months, and let me tell you the only thing that happened quickly was my account balance.

Taking the priority express lane down the drain. This is the first key difference between traders and gamblers, while traders focus on making profits slowly and steadily in the next 100 or next thousand trades gamblers want shortcuts to get there in the next 10 trades and that's the reason. Gamblers look for chat, room alerts. They copy other people's trading streams online and anything that remotely sounds like a shortcut to profit without the work and even if they really strike a rich.

Many gamblers tend to lose and give it back to the market, because relying on luck and following others alert is simply not a repeatable strategy. Basically, when the strategy makes money, the wins are small and when it loses, the losses are big. This is truly a gambler's mindset and very different from that of a full-time day trader as a real professional trader. The time horizon we should aim for is the next one to three years out, rather than trying to make it quick.

In addition, real traders focus on journaling their trades, whether it's a loss or a win and meticulously review the chart's executions and dive into the analytics behind all the trade data. There's always lessons to be learned. Traders want to know why they make profit, so they can keep repeating those habits and they also want to know why they lost so they can stop paying for other people's lamborghini. Now the gamblers would say, oh sure, everything's easy in hindsight, blah blah blah and never look back at their losses and learn from their past mistakes.

They would immediately come back again the next day and look for the next 10 easy trades and try to repeat the same gambling behaviors again. The second key difference between real traders versus the gamblers is that traders focus on trading their back tested strategies, while gamblers take random trades or even worse, put the money into some random stocks. They see people talk about on youtube, twitter or tick tock. I think this pretty much sums up most of 2021, with a rise of retail trading and wall street bets trading, yolo style had become the norm and all the sudden trading like degenerate, gamblers or artists became cool, and if you follow risk management and stop out of Your trades, like a professional trader, would do then you are laughed upon and you're also called paper hands.

This definitely happened to me a lot for most of last year when i showed that i closed my trades on gamestop or amc for profit and sometimes for a loss. Hey i'm totally fine paper handing it so long. I can remain green, profitable and live to trade. Again in 2022 and onwards, in the last two years, it became cool to go all in to one or a few stocks, with highly questionable fundamentals in highly leveraged out of the money options calls it also became cool to risk a lot of money and throw them Into whichever stocks are most talked about on youtube, or god forbid, reddit to me all these seems like the epiphany of gambling.

I'm sure there are people who made it big doing these yolo trades and they are shared on washing bets, but the majority of people probably lost money. Let's keep in mind that gamestop amc and the washi beds movements were just a movement and yes, it's very inspiring to watch the masses. The little guys and gals show the market makers and hedge fund managers that retail can bend together and take action. But just understand diamond hand, investing is not trading, and while that strategy worked for a short period of time, it's not repeatable day after day year after year for professional traders, especially in the current downtrending market environment, where stocks are hitting two 52-week lows overnight, gap, downs And just selling off due to a fear of interest rate hikes inflation and war, yellowing or diamond handing, and simply not going to work in this market.

So if you are a new trader who want to take this business seriously, remember random trades, random setups from random stocks on social media will lead to random results. Gamblers trade based on what's being hyped up online and from following others, while real traders, trade based on the back-tested strategies, it's only by tracking your trades that you can start seeing whether you are better at going long or short, whether you are better at trading large Cap or small caps and what kind of risk ratio do you have in your trading strategies and how should they be modified in a market crash or a bearish market environment? These are all the important questions. You'll need to find out for yourself from the data. In your trading journal, you can get a free copy of my trading journal to get started.

If you sign up down below, you also receive a free weekly watch list from me sent out every single sunday and while you're checking out the weekend watch list and the trading journal, please remember to drop a like on this video and subscribe. I really appreciate your support of this channel and my chosen charity of choice. The bag holder foundation. The third key factor that differentiates traders from gamblers is that traders have a firm control of their emotions and will know when to call it quit on a red day.

After a certain lost threshold, while gamblers being addicted to adrenaline and unable to control their greed, fear and anger often give in to the rush of the moment and continue on to losing even more. I definitely remember this feeling of addiction in my first year in trading. Every single loss, however big or small, is enough to pull me back to the keyboard and forced me to place another trade immediately after the loss. I just felt this rush and uncontrollable urge to make that money back to repair, not just my account, but let's be real.

Also, my ego, my ego just didn't - want to be wrong reflecting back on those early years as a new trader, i can definitely say that one of the key factors to helping me transition to become profitable over time is letting go of my ego, basically accepting that The market is always right and yes, you and i the little traders and investors. We could be wrong. There's a famous saying the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and that's 120 true in day trading. Yes, i did the math right.

Not only do you need to be right on the thesis, but you also need to be right on the execution and timing. So, instead of trying to fight the news fight the market and fight the trend, as many new traders do - and yes i used to do all the above, i now just cut the trade. According to my predetermined risk area, just cut it move on to the next one and don't backhold and don't diamond hand either. Okay, you can just make money from trading well and disciplined and buy your own diamonds later on letting go of.

My ego definitely helped me with emotional control, as well as day traders. We see the deepest and the rawest human emotions in ourselves within a span of a few hours that most people would need the rest of their lives to experience. While many people preach that as traders, we need to eliminate all emotions. However, my personal approach is rather than trying to suppress the fear, greed and euphoria that we all feel as humans.

I simply learned to consciously recognize those particular emotions in the moment and have proper steps to face all those emotions, for example. Nowadays, when i feel frustrated after getting stopped out two or three times on the same ticker, i simply remove that ticker from the screen and when i accidentally executed orders i'm position sizing, buy or sell. I simply get out of the trade all together. No longer do i try to revenge trade because of anger, frustration or panic.

I simply accept that hey, you know what i'm just wrong on this trade. I do feel frustrated and therefore i should just stop. The market will still be here again tomorrow and if you want to maintain discipline and self-control, you have to look inwards in yourself and take some responsibility, eliminate your ego and recognize all the emotions. Otherwise, you will forever be trading like a gambler.

Let me know in the comment section below: what do you think is the difference between trading and gambling and if you disagree with my point, please let me know i would love to hear your thoughts on this topic, so traders next time before you decide to gamble And randomly click the buy button on some random stock. Consider placing your gamble on the like button. Instead, best case scenario: you win a lamborghini worst case is hey. You got some really terrible jokes.

Thank you guys so much for watching. As always, i'm the humble trader and i'll see you guys next time you.