[mattmaroon]

Yeah, don't daytrade. It's a sucker's game. The market is too close to efficient for you to recoup what you lose in brokerage fees and excess taxes.

Fund your IRA to the max, and if you're 20+ years from retirement buy all ETFs with low expense rations. If you're closer to retirement, buy fewer stocks and more t-bills, etc.

[Brushfire]

Its hardly a suckers game if you know what you are doing. I know prop traders that make huge bank essentially daytrading on the forex and others.

Sure, its highly controlled gambling, but you of all people should realize that its not a losing game for everyone. If anything, its just a suckers game for small timers -- like all other gambling.

[mattmaroon]

Any sufficiently volatile form of gambling has big winners. That doesn't mean it's +EV. The markets (especially forex, from what I hear) are such that even if it were impossible to outperform the broader indexes, you could very well know multiple people who did so over a period of years or even decades.

See Fooled by Randomness for a more detailed explanation.

[volida]

if you open 1 lot in your life and sell it and outperform the market, yes that's random. If you open more lots and your success rate is higher than 50% then you can't really call it random. Playing random in forex kills you.

You can treat it as gambling yes, but it's not.

[mattmaroon]

You can win more than 50% of wagers even over fairly large numbers if you're -EV, especially if you're only slightly so and the variance is large. And with tens of millions of people attempting to do this between forex, stocks, futures, etc., it's a virtual certainty that one could find a large number who have.

Again, read Fooled by Randomness.

[volida]

I think it's a combination of factors luck, knowledge, practice, that ultimately their result may be called random.

However my opinion is that Forex is not gambling. In wagers to win big you must either combine different bets with odds that pay as someone predefined. If you combine more, the need for luck increases. If you bet a large amount of money on high paying odds then again you need luck.

In contrary, foreign exchange you just trade the currency according to your prediction. The only way to automatically lose the negative lot is going off your margin. To win big, your prediction doesn't need to go against the odds like a soccer bet for example.

But, I will check out that book. Thanks

[steveplace]

The market is too close to efficient for you to recoup what you lose in brokerage fees and excess taxes.

No, it's not. Far from it. EMT is not practical in the short term.