Are you interested in making consistent earnings as a professional trader?
Oftentimes, when you tell people how you generate my income by trading in the stock market, they look at me funny and ask “Isn’t that risky?” or “Doesn’t that depend on luck?” or even “Isn’t that gambling?”
And I’m here to tell you that, yes. Trading can be compared to gambling. Like gambling, trading is also based on luck and does carry a lot of risks. The market, in more ways than one, is absolutely just a giant casino.
So consider this: in gambling, who always loses money? The answer is the player. The player always loses money in the longer run. Players may sometimes win, and players may sometimes even have winning streaks both in gambling and in stocks.
But it is always based on luck. Eventually, the luck runs out, and the uncaring powers of statistics begin to reassert itself – and then the players start to lose, and lose, and lose.
Are you a Binomo trader who’s still learning the ropes of trading? Here’s a very detailed guide on how to trade like a casino for consistent profits!
The one who always wins in the end
In every game, in every gamble and every loss of the player’s money – there is always someone who profits at the end of the day. And I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase a thousand times before; “the house always wins”.
In a casino, the house always makes money no matter what happens. That is why the best casinos always give away lots of free food, free drinks, and free high-quality entertainment just to entice people to come to their grounds. Just to attract people to play.
So the more people play, the more they lose – and the more money the casinos earn. But how can they ensure such a striking advantage so that every game of chance seems to lean their way?
This is what I am here to tell you. Learn this trick, and you can set yourself up like a casino even in the stock market so that you always gain money at the end.
The trick: how do casinos and traders get profits?
So now you may be asking, how do they do it? What casinos do is they rig the game in such a way that they always have a statistical edge over their customers. The house makes it so that they have a positive expectancy while the player always has a negative expectancy.
Confused? Here’s how it works.
Let’s take for example a typical game called roulette. This game has a giant wheel – and this wheel is composed of various slices denoted by numbers and in three colors (18 black, 18 red, and 2 green). The wheel spins on a central axis, and the house throws a ball into the spinning wheel. The players then can bet on which number the ball may land on. The players can bet whether it is going to be an odd or an even number, or if it will be a black or red number.
That explained, let’s say you, as a player, bet that the ball will land on a black number. You’d think that both you and the house would have a 50/50 chance of winning.
But this is not the case.
Let’s examine. There are 18 red numbers, 18 black numbers, 18 even numbers, and 18 odd numbers. But remember – there are two green numbers, the 0 and the double 0.
This is their secret. Let’s examine. If you bet on black, your chance is 18 out of 36, right? Wrong. Remember, there are two green numbers left. So, your chance is 18 black numbers, but then the house’s chance is 20 out of 38. Because if the ball lands on the green, the casino still wins as well.
So let’s calculate. The player’s chance of making money is about 47.23%. The casino’s chance of winning is 52.7%. So what makes casinos win every time? Subtract 52.7 by 47.23, and you’ll see that in every game of roulette happening across the entire building, the casinos have an edge of about 5.47%%.
What the 5.47% means
So the casino gains a 5.47% advantage over the player and that’s how they profit at the end of the day. But what exactly does this mean?
Basically, for every dollar placed in a game of roulette, over the thousands upon thousands of roulette games that transpire in the building over a short time, the house already owns 5.47% of your dollar, which is 5.47 cents. So, if a million dollars is placed in just one single bet, the casino already owns $54.7k. But even if it wasn’t a huge, high-rolling bet of a million dollars, the casino still gains a ton of money just from the minor but extremely abundant bets happening under the house.
This means that they make more profit the more money people bet.
Let’s explain it in another way.
Let’s say in one particular gaming night, there are a thousand bets that occur in the casino. Each bet is worth a thousand dollars, so all in all there’s a million dollars worth about to exchange hands on top of the gambling table. And from our previous analysis, statistically out of a thousand bets, the casino is going to win 52.5%, and the player is only going to win 47.3%
So, out of the thousand bets going on, the casino is set to win 527 bets and lose 473 bets – which translates to $5.27k in profit and $4.73k in losses. Subtract their profit from their loss and you get $54k.
That’s how casinos arrive at their profits with their statistical edge.
The common scenario in trading
Before we discuss how professional traders ‘rig the market’ to replicate the business model of casinos, let’s first discuss the common scenario. The status quo is this – most of the people who will trade in the markets will lose money. And when I say most, I mean most – just about 90% of people will lose. The reason for this is because these people do not have a plan.
Most people enter the stock market based on opinions, or tips, and they trade based on rumors and their own emotions. This baseline scenario seems to result in about 50/50 win-lose chances, right? Not that bad.
Well, yes, but that’s not the end of the story. See, when you go to a casino, you bet a dollar, you lose a dollar. However, in the stock market, people hold on to stocks even when they’re already losing much more than they put in. Or in the reverse, liquidate too soon when they get a profit because they don’t want to risk the price going back down. This means that they lose big when they are wrong and still gain small, even when they are right.
This happens because of common trading psychology.
To illustrate, let’s look at two situations. Suppose you bought a stock for $10, hoping that prices are going to go up so you can trade in a profit. Sure enough, it goes straight down. And what commonly happens is you hold on to the stock, hoping for a comeback at some later point in time. Meanwhile, the price continues to plummet. But you still hold on, because you’ve held on to it for so long. And all of it results in a big, big loss. Much more than you originally spent on the initial investment.
Now let’s say your 10$ went up. Suddenly, you get a profit. But then fear and greed sets in. You start thinking, you should liquidate this before it falls back down again. You think you already made some money, you want to take it. As a result, you missed out on some significant price growth because you exited the market too early. Fear of loss and instant gratification tendencies are a dangerous combination.
The bottom line is; because of psychology, people are more prone to lose big and gain small. And given that they’re only right half of the time, it is pretty much guaranteed that traders like this will lose money.
How professional traders rig the market
Now as professional traders, we need to land winning trades at the end of the day. And how is that possible? Simple – by replicating the business model of a casino.
As mentioned earlier, casinos rig the game to always have a statistical edge over the player.
The first thing we need to do is mitigate the 50/50 win-loss chance of trading. The market is unpredictable, yes, but within it – and visible only to those who can see it, are patterns. These patterns are replicable, and more reliable than a 50/50 chance. To do this, we have to study the market. We have to be able to use technical analysis and be able to spot specific price action patterns that may signal what’s going to happen next. If we do this, we can enter and exit the market when everything is in our favor.
Let’s hear another sample scenario.
Markets only have three directions to go; upwards, downwards, or sideways. Let’s look at upwards and sideways trends for now.
Look for any uptrend stock prices and you’ll immediately see that the stocks don’t go up in a straight line. They have wave patterns that denote high points of value, which looks like hills or ‘peaks’. The upwards line indicates impulse buying, and the slight downwards dip after a peak is the result of impulse correction. You’ll notice that every time it hits a certain level (a level defined by a straight line moving through the lower dips of the prices), it bounces back up. This is called the ‘moving average’ or the ‘support line’. When the price of the stock touches it’s support line, it’s very likely to go up once again.
This pattern is easily identifiable, even for novice traders. What’s even better is that it is replicable. Meaning that the pattern and the outcome happen way too often to be a coincidence. Therefore, there is a high chance that the pattern may repeat itself. And because we know the pattern and we know the implications of the pattern, when we use this for our trading our odds become better than 50/50.
As professional traders, this is where we come in. We buy it because when an uptrend hit’s a support level, it’s likely to go back up.
But take note that this doesn’t happen 100% of the time. Of course not – this is the financial market, and if anything else the markets are known for being unpredictable.
So, if the percentage is not 100%, is it worth it? The short answer is yes. The long answer is a bit more complex.
Let’s say because of the pattern, you now have a 60% chance of being right. This is 10% more than the normal chance of 50%. There will be a 40% chance that the market will go on a downward trend for the 60% chance that it will go to an uptrend. So, what’s your edge? Your edge is a 60% chance of being right minus 40% chance of being wrong.
Your statistical edge is 20% – casinos only had 5.47% from our previous example, and casinos make millions every day.
But let’s say 60% is too high a statistical advantage. Let’s say 55%, a mere 5% more than random chance. Some would say 55% would not be worth it – but that is wrong. Your edge is still at 10%, still better than being a casino.
How to manage your risks like a professional trader
If you think about it that simplistically, being a stock trader offers you more chances to get your investment back than opening a casino does.
But we haven’t even come to the best part yet. In casinos, you always gain 2 for every 1 you bet. If you bet $100, you can either lose the entire $100 or gain another $100. But in trading, we never bet 1 for 1! Professionals always bet something along the lines of 1 for 2. In other words, we only risk $1 to make $2 or more.
How? Buy putting a ‘stop-loss’ to mitigate the amount you will lose and a set target price to lock in on the amount that you want to win.
Now let’s look at an example where the market is going sideways – or is ‘ranging’. The ranging asset reaches all the resistance and support levels. Once again, the probability of a market continuing its trend is up for everyone’s guess – basically just 50/50. But now that you’ve identified the patterns, say we raise the probability of our guess being right to 60% again. You decide to enter the market at about $11 – but do not want to risk a lot of money.
No matter, just put a stop loss. A stop loss is a type of executable command in trading platforms that allows you to set the loss that you can take. Say you don’t want to lose more than $2, so you set your stop loss to $9. When the price reaches $9, the broker automatically liquidates your asset for you, with a loss of exactly $2.
A target price is just like the stop loss, but for executing positive transactions. Let’s say you want your assets to be liquidated when the price reaches $15. A target price is going to do that for you automatically.
So we see in this example that you are trading in a 1:2 ratio of risk-return. If you were wrong, you lose $2, but if you’re right you gain $4. Now with this scheme, all you have to do is make sure the distance between your stop loss and your target price is suitable for your risk tolerance.
A winning formula
If you follow this formula religiously, you are likely to gain consistent profit from trading. In 100 trades, for example, if you have an edge of 20%, then most likely I’m going to win 60% of my trades and lose 40% of my bets.
But each time when you lose, you only lose a little, and when you win, you win by a lot. Why? Remember the stop loss. What happens is, within the 40% chance that you lose, your gains as defined by your stop-loss is minimal. Say, my stop loss is always set to the previous example of $2. And my target price is set to double that amount, at $4. This means that, if you are wrong, you only lose $2 but if you are right you stand to gain $4. The risk-reward ratio is at 1:2.
Let’s say that you made 100 trades worth $1 each. With your knowledge of trends, patterns, and technical analysis tools, you gained $60 but lost $40. Subtract what you gained with what you lost, and overall, you still have a $20 of profit.
Now, let’s examine another scenario.
Say you’re in a losing streak, and your win rate drops to merely 50%. Not more than random luck. So you lose 50% of the trades, and you win 50% of the trades – but with a stop loss of say $1 and a target price of $2, you only lose about $50 while you still stand to gain $100. Subtract your gains from your losses, and it shows that you still gain $50. This shows that even in the worst-case scenario of a severe losing streak, you can still make a profit as long as you properly calibrate your stop-loss and targets.
How to trade like a casino for consistent profits
This is how trading professionals ‘rig the market’ by trading like the casinos. Essentially, you only really need to do three things; avoid the common psychological pitfalls that stem from lack of planning and emotional attachment to your assets, read the market and look for repeatable patterns that you can exploit, and manage risk by setting solid boundaries when cutting losses and solid goals when defining profits.
How do casinos make millions of money? It’s not magic, nor is it some complicated bit of science too high for common people to understand. It’s simply a matter of basic psychology and statistics, and maybe a little bit of study. After that, all it takes is just a little bit of a hustle for you to trade like a casino.
Hope you enjoyed that! If you’re interested in trading yourself, you should also sign up for a free demo account at Binomo!
Good luck on your trading journey with Binomo!