Is there a hard threshold? Do high risk investments such as penny stocks qualify as gambling? Do low risk investments? Annuities? Bonds? CDs?
This comment got me wondering.
Is it more to do with the venue? Stock markets and real estate vs casinos and the lottery?
Were the MIT Blackjack Team gambling or investing?
Is this just another semantic hotdogs are sandwiches discussion or is there an agreed threshold?
Just because you are wrong about your expected value calculations (or were right but the actual return was on the lower end of the range) and have made a bad investment doesn’t change the fact that it was an investment because you were doing it for the returns.
In short, performance doesn’t matter for this distinction, at least IMO.
You can dress it up in whatever language you want but when nobody is able to consistently beat the market it looks a hell of a lot like gambling.
The DJIA (e.g.) isn’t “the house”. It isn’t something you are competing with in that your losses are its/their gain. You are misunderstanding both investing (in general and the stock market specifically) and gambling when you make that confusion/analogy.
Not beating the market but having positive returns is only “losing” when infinite exponential growth is the goal. Beating the market but having negative returns is not “winning”.