What is the difference between "practice" and "over-trading"?

Gambling with an edge is not gambling, its speculating. There is a difference between gambling and speculating, however grey the area is.

There really is no difference between gambling and professional gambling, what’s the difference? Is it that the mug who quit there day job to gamble is now a professional gambler?

Card counting is speculating, as there is an edge, playing poker is speculating, as there is an edge (providing you are playing against players and not the house, i.e. 3 card poker…) and running an insurance is also speculating as there is the knowledge of past claims etc.

I’m just trying to separate out the term gambling from speculating. It’s all about the possibility of gaining a true statistical edge, (not an edge that you think you have in your head).

In black and white

Gambling = NO EDGE due to statistical barriers
Speculating = EDGE due to no statistical barriers

By the way, I’m not trying to argue or come across as an arrogant idiot, just trying to get a common misconception of facts :slight_smile:

What you’re calling speculating is what I’m calling professional gambling. You’re right that having an edge is not something a person can just think they have. Possessing an edge means having a strategy that has positive expectation. Our differences are really semantic and I think ultimately we’re on the same page.

I guess it’s different in the UK but in the US professional gambling means what you’re calling speculation.

There’s a fine line between gambling and risk.

As a trader or trading you can have the option to take risk off the table completely, either from a trailing stop or what not, you can scale out therefore you have structured yourself to win no matter what.

Where as gambling you have no control of the outcome and last I checked you can’t take money off the roulette table, poker table, whatever table suits your “everything I drop money on to make money is gambling” ideal. I have dealt with many of your kind and I’m kind of tired of explaining this.

Hell you might as well call investing gambling, your putting money based on the odds that this new business with the model of selling computers to regular consumers rather than corporate targets. You can mitigate risk by giving them a little for some progress like your raising your bid and the rules like im gambling your not able to while the game is in play take your money off the table before the final card comes up on the river and your boned. The company was a shill your money’s gone.

Its like most of you people are afraid that there’s some evil casino boogeyman card shark waiting to take your money and then its time to ask why are you even here asking traders or trying to justify your right for calling it gambling. If your point is valid, great, we don’t care, you’ve accepted its gambling we’ve accepted it as trading and if you insist on telling everyone its gambling don’t do it, sorry this ain’t the corner you belong in.

Also, you can analyze because we will all have losing trades on why they lost and try to downsize when you lose. In gambling you lose or skip so many hands how are you supposed to analyze? Don’t say counting cards or calculating the statistical odds because the casino WILL KICK YOU OUT IF YOU ARE COUNTING. E-poker can be programmed and fixed as well to make plays “interesting”. You can’t go back to table 36 on your 12th hand and say oh god damn if I had hit again I would of had more because the cowboy was ****ting his pants with a crap pair and the other chump who won was just bluffing all his way through.

U know sometimes don’t listen to people and experience everything yourself, this way you will truly learn bad and good. And trading is definitely not gambling, if you suck and u think its gambling its ur own mentality, show me Profesional roulette player(none), and show me professional trader(lots).

Well, I will eat my words. According to this economics book I’m reading, speculation is wagering on [B]pre-existing risk[/B] whereas gambling is wagering on [B]created risk[/B]. So in that sense running a casino would be gambling but running an insurance company or trading would be speculation. My apologies. :slight_smile:

And sorry for hijacking your thread, PrecisionFX. :frowning:

Im actually gonna quote that and what jezz said in the future now.

im with you Tansen

I think you’ll find that a “card counter” is not a professional gambler, he’s a cheat.

Interestingly the American courts have ruled that card counting is not cheating because you’re just using your mind and cheating would have to involve manipulation of the cards somehow. But card counters do use deceptive tactics to avoid detection which is hard because there are things a counter must do to be profitable, like changing bet sizes, especially at the end of a shoe.

I know the US courts have ruled that card counting is not cheating but now i’m not so sure about the reasoning because there are forms of cheating that don’t require manipulating the cards like having a partner try to peek at the dealer’s cards and signal you.

If its not cheating then why do they even need to avoid detection? Just go right up and announce you’re a card counter to the dealer before you begin.

For me, If we follow the trading plan consistently, that’s not overtrading…but when we trade based on our emotion that’s what I call overtrading…

According to me, [B]Practice[/B] is doing something in limit while [B]Over practice[/B] is forgetting any limit and being addicted to achieve more and more without thinking about good or wrong related with that.

This is absolutely right.

No worries. Was an interesting debate!

My experience of over-trading is “Ready-Fire-Aim.” As opposed to the obvious “Ready-Aim-Fire.”

The other thing that is interesting though is that you don’t learn to ride a bike without falling off or in essence making mistakes. Wouldn’t more practice lead to learning faster? If you are a swing trader for example, your learning process could be years simply to develop a plan that is profitable if you are always waiting for the “right” entries?

(This is running under the assumption that you are always learning and improving anyways - not that you have “arrived”)

Hi Precision FX

Thanks for posting about this in the forum. This is the exact problem I have been grappling with lately. I’m a wannabe swing trader. Swing trading suits my time zone and my lifestyle. However, I don’t get a lot of practice demo trading. It can be frustrating looking at the charts and seeing nothing for days or weeks on end. Lately I’ve been placing a lot of trades that are not 100% right. I was justifying this to myself as I have a new platform and wanted to test out the software and how the order placing worked. Fair enough. But today I placed a trade that I felt quite uncomfortable with. I was just placing the trade for the sake of it. For some reason I placed it anyway and again justified it to myself as in, ‘I might learn something’. And I did learn something. It was ‘don’t place bad trades’.

So, I’m also wondering how I can get more practice in. While I’m quite a patient person in general, however, I would like to trade live within the next decade or two ;-). I now have a trade simulator on my ipad which is quite good. It has some of the indicators on it that I use. I’ve been thinking that I could try to alter my system a little to increase the number of trades, or perhaps I should look for a new system while still testing this one. I’ve also been thinking about trying to trade on a smaller timeframe just to get more practice trading. None of this is really ideal. But that’s just the reality I’m working with. I guess, if I’m going to trade this system live anytime I’m going to have to learn to sit on my hands sooner or later. Better to learn now, I guess.

Kylie

If counting cards is cheating then using basic strategy is cheating because a computer was used to run billions of hands to come up with the correct play.

By counting cards you are simply keeping track of the mathematics that dictate correct play.

The only thing that is “illegal”, in the eyes of the casino, is betting enough to overcome the money
lost to a negative slug.

If you count cards out loud but never change your bet size then they WILL NOT ban you.

I’d personally advise not to trade on a iPad… Cause its pretty distracting considering the fact that you are most likely going to be outdoors or away from your computer. Second, I’d say that once you’re pretty confident of what you are doing, why not go small. Send in $100-$500 to trade a micro lot. There’re lots of money psychology to be learnt out there, which I am still doing after trading for a few years… =)

I think over-trading occurs when you do not have a plan and that you are trading in an inappropriate time frame. As for practice, it’s a way for you to make your strategy better.

here here my friend, really nice tip of advice. we are so stuck up on tech innovations and the so called freedom that comes with it, that we kinda forget the freedom itself is also pretty distorted and to manage smth serous like even an auto-trading account needs its serious attatntion. o/w nobody to blame but urself for blowing your account.