Lets be very clear about it. If asked what you do for a job/living and you respond saying you are a professional gambler/punter you will get looked upon as if you have just committed some heinous crime. The stigma attached to betting knows no bounds.
It will get to a point where you will downplay what you do or come up with imaginative ways to describe what you do. The generic phrase ‘trader’ ticks a lot of boxes. Its tough to really get to the bottom of why it is so frowned upon but you would have thought the advent
of the internet and online betting would have helped. That doesn’t appear to be the case. Be aware that if you go into the gambling sector as a career, that it is very easy to get pigeonholed in it and not get out of it readily.
It is one of life’s little mysteries that a city trader can be put on such a pedestal and is a career that people aspire to emulate. Ultimately, they are using very similar skillsets to the ones that gamblers use. Risk management, uncertainty, variance, risk, causality, biases, etc,
The main differences are that in sports betting the outcomes are usually binary, whereas in the city losses and gains are non binary. One of the big differences is that the City has been a rising tide ever since it has existed. Obviously the returns have varied significantly
over shorter time frames but over the longer run it has always gone up. Therefore it takes a pretty special effort not to be able to generate positive returns over the longer run. How positive those returns are is where the skill clearly is. Its not a zero sum game though.
You also have the situation where government intervention has a huge impact on the stock markets (just look at the recent Fed printing machines). This isn’t a skill that can be reasonably attributed to the trader but they will get plenty of credit when markets soar.
If markets fall there is always something or someone to blame. One of the reasons why being a professional gambler for me, is far more impressive than being in the City, is that if I win or lose I am doing it with my money. Yes that’s right. My money! If I do badly then I am the one liable for the money I lose. I am not effectively gambling with other peoples hard earned money. Yet we are somehow in a situation where one job is revered and the other scorned upon. Go figure. And yes I do have a massive chip on my shoulder about these perceptions!!
ProPunting 