April 03, 2026 ·
The general phrase for financial markets in Hindi, Punjabi, and many Indic languages is satta bazaar, meaning gambling market. There's no surprise that finance and trading abstractions in markets are assumed to be synonymous with gambling in many cultures. The funny part isn't that this assumption is untrue, it's actually partly correct, more on which below, but that gambling-based explanations of markets are self-fulfilling. One can indeed gamble in financial markets, so in some sense they can be treated as casinos...but only if one chooses to. The point at which markets separate into gambling and not-gambling is the self. There's a path and mindset in which one may systematize their process and develop strategies, which is what separates unexamined, intuition-based-gambling from examined, conjecture-based-investing (or trading). But even there, I repeatedly come across a common criticism that the so-called examination and math-based theater is pointless; that it's all just gambling with extra steps. I believe that view to be misleading and wrong; usually held by people philosophically skeptical of STEM-based disciplines for a variety of reasons, or put another way, people who don't fully trust math and physics to work in load-bearing ways.
All gambling is trading, but not vice-versa.
The belief that financial markets are synonymous with gambling is often so deeply rooted that I've learnt not to argue it over time, or even bring it up for that matter. What people want is not to appear uncouth about money and have messy discussions of it tucked away from sight as they enjoy art and cucumber sandwiches. Discussing money is not classy; one surely must be greedy or struggling to be actively discussing it and strategizing about it out loud in groups. Your unemployed friend on a Tuesday afternoon daydreaming business ideas comes to mind. Yet someone, somewhere in the chain of all wealth is inevitably concerned about ways to preserve it and make more of it. Like Adam Smith we must differentiate self-interest from unprincipled greed.
There's some benefit in not being bothered about money, which again, aggregates at the self. It's stressful to think about and feels distant from the more human aspects of life. A zoomed in version of interacting with the market way too much, called day-trading, is objectively a terrible, degenerative profession for any human (or AI, frankly). But the trouble with it is its high frequency of interaction with markets, not the trading part itself. What happens when one creates mindful distance from these highly frequent interactions with the market? Investing is a classier word for trading done at a much lower pace and frequency. A lesson I have learnt after years of trading is that one must progressively bias towards decreasing the frequency at which they make transactions, while increasing the ethical and moral considerations of them with time. Which means a successful trader eventually merges with the investor. The part to avoid is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and claim all transactions are gambles and nothing more; then not partaking in the game altogether. That's too far the other way, and also a recipe to eventually become poor.
A joke I once heard this professor say on a clip at X was that the difference between a trader and investment banker is that you'll never see a trader at the opera.
Invest and generate. Don't gamble or degenerate.
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