Is Forex Gambling?

Well, I agree with you that Forex is not gambling.

Forex is not gambling.

Some peoples with the bla3 said that those peoples who don’t accept Forex as gambling don’t even know what is a trading.

Well, in my opinion those peoples who said Forex is gambling don’t even know what is a trading. :slight_smile:

If Forex is gambling become a merchant and selling thing is gambling too, who can guarantee peoples will buy your things.

If you go to work, who knows tomorrow your place where you work go bankrupt and can’t pay you after your hard work, like some students on my campus who did part time job there but the payment keep get postponed because of various reasons.

If you deposit your money to the bank, who knows that your bank will go bankrupt tomorrow and you lose all of your money, there have been some real cases like this in my country.

Well, we can’t even guarantee we can live until tomorrow… who knows that maybe this night there will be crashing plane in your house and all of us die.

Let’s say I have a setup with 70% accuracy.

You know as long as I’m discipline with my system and can survive for a long consecutive losses in the end I’ll always be the winner and the probability that I get stopped out is almost zero.

Out side of the brokers scam action, the probability that I’ll lose in the long run or in the certain period is as big as there will be a falling plane in my house tomorrow.

[I]Sorry for my English.[/I]

Depends on how you define gambling.

Is having sex without a glove gambling?

Very good post my friend.

Totally agree with you here

If you cannot tell me for absolute certain prior to the trade which one will win, or which one will lose, you are no different than any other successful gambler in the world.

You may have a positive expectancy, but are still gambling, because there is risk, and no certain outcome.

All the people on here arguing that forex is not gambling. You’re all profitable, yes?

So funny reading newbs argue semantics!

Your style to trade in market determines either your attempts are sensible for a business or you are just playing with your money as gambling. Some people think forex a gambling so they do not feel the need for planning . I feel forex is managed business y ou can manage your risk if you are really a serious trader.

Yes, of course it’s gambling, you don’t know the outcome for certain. You can always gamble with an edge, so by suggesting that something is “gambling” does not automatically assume that it’s a money losing activity.

But is it really gambling…we should all spend a lot more time examining this question.

Is forex gambling?..in my opinion…yup…but for me, maybe it depends on the person’s trading.

A: If the person uses technical analysis or strategies on his trading…then naturally, this person considers him self that he is doing a business as he invest his own time to it.

B: If the person is just trading with the flow…then, for him…it’s just a game or maybe a gambling…

Me, i’m in the B:…I’m no expert and i only have 1 year in experience…and until now i don’t use technical strategies or what so ever. I just look at the chart and just go with the flow…with that i made my $500 up to $26k. My reason is very simple…NO ONE KNOWS the future…for me if everyone can determine the future of the rate by using strategies or technical analysis, then everyone is a millionaire by now…for me, it’s just picking one direction…either it will go up, or down…50/50…hence…it’s gambling…

Or maybe i’m just an stupid amateur because i haven’t experience applying technical analysis or strategies to my trading yet.

No offense to everyone please…this is just my opinion…you decide…

Forex is not gambling or bet. I think the one who says forex is gambling is the people who still new in forex.
After you learn, try and practice a lot, you will know that forex its the big investment business.

This is ridiculous. No, seriously. Do you think that the broker is not interested in that you lost? He (broker) is the mass of tricks to have a normal trader lost. No wonder Statistics - 95% losses. So yes, it’s a game.
By the way about the game - you know that there is a new - binary options. There’s a real game. But there are also people think that it is not a gamble. It all depends on the perception i think.

I think its strange that spread betting is classed as gambling but normal forex is classed as trading , They might be a difference in the two but surly the risk is the same with the same out come in the end .

“Is Forex Gambling???”

No.

Can’t be bothered to read 52 pages.

Bottom line is the mathematical expectancy. If you go to a casino it is a negative expectancy and after 1,000 bets you will have lost money.

In trading, your strategy has an expectancy whether or not you are aware of it. If it is a negative expectancy then after 1,000 trades you will have lost money. If you have created a strategy with a positive expectancy then after 1,000 trades you will have taken money from others.

To debate the labels of a strategy is a fool’s game. What is the expectancy of your system? That is all the matters.

I found this a good read, may also help determine the question being asked

How does flipping a coin relate to trading probabilities? Simple, we can look at different probabilities of trading outcomes based on the distribution that results from a pure 50/50 chance outcome.

What do I mean?

Although the odds of a successful trade are rarely exactly 50/50, let’s assume that – for the moment – they are. Let’s say you take ten trades in a row. What can you expect to happen?

You can expect that 5 out of the 10 trades (or coin tosses) will ‘win’ (or, come up heads). What is the actual distribution like, though?

Did you know that the odds of having exactly 5 of the 10 trades (or coin flips) win is only 24.61%? That means that roughly 75% of the time, you’ll have a different result than what you expect!

To be fair, the probability of having 4, 5, or 6 winning trades (plus or minus 1 from the expected value) is 65%, which is in line with the standard “bell curve.”

What is the probability of having a run of 10 out of 10 trades be winners (or losers)? It’s only 0.10%. Rare, but it can happen.

Let’s look at the results from a randomized study I completed in Excel, based on flipping a fair coin 10 times, for 10,000 trials (something that might take months in the real world) and count the number of times ‘heads’ comes up in each of the 10 series of trials.

This will be similar to what you can expect if you took say 100 sets of 10 trades each and asked “how many trades can be expected to be winners?”

Let’s look at the distribution:


Remember, with odds of 50%, we would expect 5 throws out of 10 to come up heads.

We would expect the next most common values to be 4 or 6 throws out of ten to come up heads.

We would not expect many at all to turn up a series of 10 heads in a row (or 10 tails in a row).

Despite that, out of 10,000 series of 10 tosses, we had 10 runs of 10 tails in a row and 11 runs of 10 heads in a row.

What does this mean for trading?

If you can expect to win 50% of your trades, this would be similar to the distribution of possible outcomes, and their respective probabilities based on a series of winners or losers. Most of the time, you’ll fall one or two values away from the expected value (exactly 5 out of 10), but sometimes, you’ll get a string of losers or winners, just through probability alone.

I don’t see Forex as a gambling business but a business where you can make good profits when you have good trading knowledge. It is traders without knowledge that will take this business as a gamble or bet business where one needs luck to succeed.

Binary option surely a bet upon market price, when keen to.gambling with fx market price binary surely provide these facilities. Upon perception there’s huge room of imagination here. One can gain profit by gambling as long as he aware the risk. Problem is people do trade with forex but only a few aware with the risk, these where those 95% sitting duck said forex are simply a gambling, because they always suffer losses overtime, and yet never aware the risk of these business.
know nothing upon any business are simply stupid gambling I think.

This is such a stimulating and controversial question! We love a bit of controversy now and then!
Some really great responses in this thread too!

Regarding my own thoughts - I believe the emotions in gambling and forex are similar, and the temptations in forex and gambling are also similar! but that’s as far as the similarities go.

Trading should not be a game of luck. It takes pre-meditated strategy, research, planning and care to succeed. We are not playing haphazardly in casinos … we are making financial transactions via regulated providers and making systematic and informed decisions.

I agree with you that everything must be approached with the knowledge. But we have statistics. And statistics show us that forex is similar to gambling. If brokers do not have the controls of the game then the situation would be different, I think

Brokers don’t have any control of the market, they are simply the middle man who you execute trades through. They facilitate the matching process of buying and selling.

Trading, be it Forex or any other asset always carries risk, just as starting a new tangible business on your local high street does. There is never guaranteed success. People in society don’t judge a new shop or bar opening up as ‘gambling’ by the owner, because it’s been commonly accepted by society as a “business”. Yet society as a whole is uneducated, and have been pushed by media, news and films to believe that trading is not a business, but more so gambling (mainly due to the luxury life styles pushed in your faces by the media, and the banks manipulation activities).

However the truth is there is no difference between an FX trader and an owner of a new restaurant - what is different is the views by society…what you have to remember is that views are not tangible (they are not real, they have no affect on success or failure). To put it simply, a lack of education is to blame, this is why people think trading is gambling, yet they view any other business activity as a sensible venture. It’s funny, but true at the same time.