The world is full of professional traders, whose job is to profit from market fluctuations. They have access to huge informational and computational resources. The only way you can beat them in the long run is to know something that they don't.
Imagine you're playing roulette. In the short-term, you'll sometimes win and sometimes lose, but in the long-term, the casino will always win out, because the odds are stacked in their favour; A European roulette wheel has 37 numbers (zero to 36) but pays out at 35/1, giving a house edge of 2.7%. All sorts of people believe that they have a 'system' that allows them to profit at roulette, but that's mathematically impossible unless you're actually cheating.
Small investors lose out in two ways - firstly, that they have much less knowledge than professional traders, and secondly that a relatively large proportion of their capital is lost to brokerage fees. Unless you have some sort of insider information, it is provably true that the best investment strategy is simply to take a diversified position (investing in a broad range of shares and bonds) and to hold that position indefinitely.
>>5027 I don't know anyone involved in trading, but I've always thought such rules are completely unenforceable, that there's little that could stop a network of executives from swapping information and funnelling it to people sufficiently disconnected from the inside. What systems exist to at least attempt detection?
>>5023 >All sorts of people believe that they have a 'system' that allows them to profit at roulette
I play roulette on fixed odds terminals thusly:
a) in the knowledge that the machine will only pay out once some other poor saps have paid in, so I don't use the same machine for a week or two after I've played on it.
b) in the knowledge that the machine will only pay out in order to get me to keep playing, so I walk away after making a quid's profit.
c) apart from that, standard martingale, which though doesn't make it impossible to lose money, just makes it very improbable.
It's worked so far. I'm going to try and make back all the money I've pumped into those fucking Pub Quiz games over the years.
>>5032 How much time do you imagine I'm 'investing'? Do you think it takes me an hour to win a quid? Do you think I visit my local on my own, purely to play the roulette machine?
>>5031 >standard martingale, which though doesn't make it impossible to lose money, just makes it very improbable
Yeah, if by very improbable you mean statistically inevitable.
The problem with the first two points of your "system" is that it supposes that the FOBT has an intelligence that it, legally, is not allowed to have.
In the UK, a fixed odds betting terminal has to be exactly that - fixed odds on every spin / deal. Legally, it can't adjust for how much it has paid out or when it last paid out.
That said, outside the UK I have, on two occasions walked up to roulette machines in dark corners of casinos and walked away with a 36/1 spin on the first go - somewhat fishy I will admit.
Martingaling is also known as the Gamblers Fallacy. It will only ever provide a guaranteed return if you have a near-infinite bankroll and the limits on the table are also near infinite. This is why all casinos have table limits. The main reason that the house always wins isn't because their meager 5% house edge is so devastating, it's merely that standard deviation is always going to bankrupt you before it bankrupts the casino.
>>5035 >This is why all casinos have table limits
It isn't. It does have that as a side effect, but limits have always primarily been put in place to stop the stakes becoming high for the operator. It would lead to a situation where they could, for example, double their months revenue lose all of that for a month, which isn't a very viable business model, even taking their advantage into account. Casinos are, unlike most patrons, reluctant to engage in high risk and irresponsible gambling.
>>5023 I never get the appeal of roulette, it's just pure luck. I guess I'm just not much of a gambler, I enjoy playing blackjack and poker but that's more for the game, gambling is just an element of it. If I had money to spare I'd go to a casino and waste some money on a few games of blackjack for the experience but roulette seems as much fun as throwing money in the bin.
>>5037 As far as casino games go, blackjack seems worse than roulette to me. It isn't really much of a game unless you play it really well, and, handily for casinos, being good at it is verboten.
You can still reduce the house edge to less than 2% by simply playing basic strategy. Only counting (and shuffle tracking etc, obviously) is actually verboten. As long as you don't vary your bets too much you almost certainly won't get kicked out of a casino, even if you are actually counting.
It's definitely preferable to playing roulette with its fixed 5% house edge.
Because the casino has a card counter in the back watching the same cards you are and can therefore predict your betting habits, if you are in fact cheating.
>>5040 >>5041 It turns out counting isn't that robust. The legendary story involves both a team of counters watching each table, and then a player turning up on a "hot" table to apply as close to perfect strategy as possible. You can render counting more or less useless with a few small steps. Small changes to the way the game is dealt can almost completely neuter it.
>>5056 Is not so much the multiple decks as what they do with them. It used to be that they shuffled the used cards and put them in the back of the shoe. Now they pull the whole shoe and shuffle all the cards. They also change the order in which cards are dealt and deal cards directly to waste face down.
Can I revive this thread? I've been doing research into investing over the past few days and would really appreciate some input from veteran investors. More particularly I'm interested in the 'daily life' aspects of investing, rather than the principles of buy-and-hold trading, which I've made a decent start of researching from Investopedia etc. Unfortunately Investopedia is very US-centric, and the vast majority of resources I've found don't deal with actual how-to-steps, mostly just guidance for someone who's already got started.
Tax efficiency is absolutely vital - get it wrong and you'll lose out on a small fortune. If your employer offers a salary sacrifice scheme, use it. If you want to manage your own pension funds, look at setting up a SIPP - you can buy shares, ETFs and other equities from your gross income. The new pension freedom rules make this even more attractive, as you can get access from the age of 55 with no penalty. Anything that you don't want to lock up long-term should be in an ISA, which now has a yearly contributions limit of over £15k.
Talk to your bank and/or an IFA about the practicalities. It's a complex topic, and the best strategy will depend on your personal circumstances.