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?
It becomes gambling when you are going on gut feelings without researching what you’re doing.
If you have an investment strategy that financial advisors approve of, let’s say investing 70% in a US index fund, 20% bonds and 10% high risk mutual funds that you don’t touch for years or decades, that’s investing.
If you’re just randomly picking stocks, buying and selling in order to make a quick buck because of some guy screaming at you on television without any real research into a company other than a few google searches, that’s gambling.
I want to remind everyone that there is no guarantee that the market / index funds continue to go up. It hasn’t happened in the US market, but look at the Nikkei over the last 30 years - if you had invested in the 90s you would only now be getting some of your money back - that is a long time.
I feel you have literally picked the single most unique example for markets not going up. You make it seem like the US’s market will need to experience the same thing eventually, and I don’t think most people would agree with that assertion. Japan’s economy is a very strange and unique case.
You make it seem like it didn’t already: The US market didn’t reach its 1929 peak again until 1954. 25 years is a long time to hold out on withdrawing your retirement investments.
Here’s two other modern markets:
The Athens Stock Exchange had peaks in the 2000’s that haven’t recovered.
Ukraine’s stock market has ceased operations since the invasion.
These events are rare, but not unheard of.
If BRICS takes hold, yea, we’ll see decades of decline then; even if unemployment is at 0%.
The loss of trust in the greenback, be that from consumer confidence or foreign countries moving on from Breckenridge (meaning the dollar is no longer the default global currency - so huge sell offs of the dollar, lowering demand =value plummets) due to our foreign policy will not be a happy time for Americans. Debts’ll come due, upon threat of physical war or sanction (which is just economic warfare). We could end up ceding land in the Pacific or elsewhere…and maintaining dual fleets, even one fleet, becomes a lot less likely.
More plausibly in my mind, America would declare war and use tactical nukes, and use them first, repeatedly and harshly, before it lets its rich get eaten…cuz the working class (<$1,000,000) has already lost their fat.
Nuking farmland or fish migrations could potentially avoid MAD but make no mistake, to the oligarchy in charge, war is the only chance they could avoid mutual assured destruction.
To the privileged, regression to the mean feels like oppression.
That’s a huge if. Part of the bonus of the US dollar is our consistency in paying back debts which the nations of BRICS haven’t shown themselves to be. Not to mention, you need a very strong reason to switch to other currencies. Hell, BRICS hasn’t even decided on a mutual currency, I believe, which means as of now, BRICS basically means going back to before the US was the world trade currency which is a huge step back.
So sure if BRICS completely gets their shit together and convinces a lot of the economy to join, that would cause problems for the US economy. Or also if Vietnam becomes a huge economy, and decides to Nuke the US, or also if aliens come and blow up the US, or if all americans decide to collectively commit suicide.
Point I’m making is your worry doesn’t seem like an imminent problem. It could, but it would be a slowly decreasing problem that hopefully the US deals with accordingly and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect people.
This is the closest answer to what I’d agree with. It’s a shame the other top comment turned into something of a squabble, because I agree with a lot of what was said there as well.
Investing always comes with some risk. Buying land or a house is typically considered a safe investment in most of the world. But that house/land can undergo a natural disaster and be ruined. Putting money into anything not insured (FDIC in the US, for example) carries a non-zero percentage of risk.
At what point does that risk cross over into gambling? I’d say when you exceed your personal risk assessment level. I have what is typically considered a higher risk portfolio. I am in my 40’s, 90+ % invested in stocks, with a definite tilt to growth stocks. I have been in that same position since I started investing at 16 in a Roth IRA. I’ve been through a few financial crisis periods and have always held firm to my belief that in my investing timeframe that my strategy is sound. Never sweated it for a second, even when my balance was small, so as it went negative before I could afford to actively contribute much to building my balance. Now I am very solid into 6 figures, and I only earn average for my state, which is 58k, but that is fairly recent.
To get the type of growth I feel I need with the pay I get, I went in knowing I would have to assume more risk. So I did a lot of work to understand the safest methods to get that growth in exchange for the volatility that can be involved in that investment approach. I was willing to accept that risk, and I stand by it decades later. If I started playing with riskier fund choices, that’d be gambling. Some mega-big growth funds can be very tempting. But the fees for those funds are guaranteed while the gains are not. So chasing an extra 1 or 2% isn’t worth that added risk to me. Things like options and stock shorting I don’t understand well, so I stay away from them since I don’t understand the associated risks. That stuff is gambling, where you can’t count on yourself to have at least a sensible margin of control over what happens.
If you are new to investing or feel confused, I always suggest the Boglehead’s Guide to Investing. It’s not trying to sell you anything and explains things in pretty easy to digest terms and tells you how to develop a simple investing strategy that you can stick to and be a relatively hands off investor. It used to be free online, but I think that’s caught up in the Hachette vs Internet Archive lawsuit, so you can check out their Getting Started wiki which is an abbreviated version of the book, plus some new and updated stuff.