People who didnt rank trading as the hardest are either still in highschool or complete morons.

I have done some of all 3 (trading the most, sports betting the least). They all share many common characteristics such as:

- dominated by luck in the short term
- house/brokerage/bookie rake
- incomplete information
- dealing with the psychology of others
- statistics/odds
- handling money
- easy to learn, difficult to master
- balancing risk and reward
- scary variance

Because of this commonality i think the skill set to succeed is similar in all 3:

- strong drive
- fearlessness but not overconfidence
- judgement
- hard work
- ability to concentrate
- willingness to constantly learn and develop
- dedication
- personal character balance
- ability to think in risk terms
- intuition
- logic

I think many of the best poker players would, with training and experience, make great traders and vice versa.

Overall it is difficult to say which is most skillful as there are different aspects to each. At a basic level none of them are particularly skillful but to be the best requires extreme skill in all 3. I would say that trading and sports betting require the accumulation of more fundamental knowledge (effectively limitless amounts) but (live) poker incorporates the extremely complex aspect of reading people.

I think trading is the most skillful in the sense that it takes the longest time for even the most natural trader to reach an exceptional level because the variety of situations which can arise are much wider than the other 2 and can't be experienced in a few years (for example various economic and political circumstances).

I am a very accomplished sports bettor and I will say good poker player (play live for a living and as far as online I have a 12bb/100 win rate at 1/2 HU over 11K hands). Sports betting is definitely tougher because it's much more information gathering and much more assimilating of that information. Also more intuition is used in sports betting. In poker you have to know what one or two guys might be thinking. In sports betting you have to know how much larger groups of people are thinking, how teams/coaches are thinking. If a line is wrong and you don't have an explanation as to why then you are just paying a premium to flip coins. Now if you are playing poker at high stakes that changes things. Who knows how much skill that takes. If I knew I would be in the nosebleeds myself right?

Traders, on the other hand, get paid to flip other people's coins. None of them have any skill whatsoever. Don't take my word for it. Read a book called "fooled by randomness". It will change how you think about almost everything.

Well I'm going to say INVESTING has the highest skill to luck ratio. If you buy a underpriced company you WILL make $$ in the long run.

I'm not even sure if sports betting can be beat. There are a lot of people making a living at poker. But how many professional sportsbettors are there? (running good for a couple years doesnt count). I guess if you live in vegas you can hustle some morons to book with you but....

How many mutual funds beat the market in the long run?

Excellent post. similar skill sets req, yet different, intriging debate.

So much for my post trying to get people to actually comprehend the original question.

If the question was "What's the hardest?" then my answer would have been completely different.

w0t? your question makes no sense. its like asking what requires more skill, being a professional basketball player or a professional golfer.

Kinda the norm on 2+2. "Question" threads generally get answers that skew at least somewhat from the actual question, especially if the question has very specific wording/meaning.

They might not be 100% on topic, but most of these responses are interesting regardless.

i know nothing about sports betting, but long term there's not much luck involved in either poker or trading imo. In the long run we're all dead though

Speak for yourself, sucka.

the underpriced company is analogous to a big fish. if phil ivey plays a huge fish, he will make money in the long run. in fact, anyone with half a brain who puts some effort into learning poker will crush the fish in the long run. and anyone with half a brain and the willingness to do some research can find underpriced companies and make money in the long run.


it's a really stupid poll in the first place. there's no way anyone can say that poker has a higher "skill factor" than trading or vice versa. "skill factor" is the most ridiculously vague thing ever.

there's a million different trading strategies. there's also a million different approaches to poker. this is a dumb poll, because it has no correct answer. nor is discussing it particularly interesting, so i'll just go away now.

I Def think it is sportsbetting, at most 2% can beat sportsbetting longterm if not less, in poker, I think its more like 5% maybe more. Not sure about daytrading.

I love the debate! I made the op in haste and obviously could have posed the question better than I did. But I think most people understood what I meant.

Maybe this is a better question to ask:

Assuming the activity is your main source of income; which requires more skill to make a consistent profit over a long period of time to lead a decent life financially: poker, trading, or sports betting?

But than you have all these questions;

Q. Define long period of time?
A. Idk, but I feel around 3+ years of continuously working to be as good as you can be should be enough to start overcoming variance for each activity.

Q. Define decent living?
A. Depends on a lot of things and will be different for each individual. Being an egocentric, I'd say enough to live the American dream.....

Q. Define trading?
A. Initially, I was thinking of day trading since I know that to be the most time intensive and I wanted the debate geared more towards something you are doing close to full time. I'm sure there are other varieities of trading that I'm unaware of that are also very time intensive.

But of course if you can do something less than what is considered full time and have it be your main source of income, that would certainly be very skillful...... all right time for bed....

Basically what I meant was: Which activity takes more skill to be successful...

Grammar nits please feel free to correct.

Peace

Anyone who thinks there is any skill in trading is living in the past. Those illusions have been shattered.

i'll bet you ren tech returns over 15% through the rest of the year. i'll even lay 2 to 1.

This thread is idiotic.

and anyone with half a brain and the willingness to do some research can find underpriced companies and make money in the long run.

Half a brain, hunh? What % of mutual funds beat the market over a ten year span?

At one level it is - the question doesn't have a definite answer. But I think there are some interesting comparisons to make. eg:

http://stockguy22.com/articles/poker-trading/

As redefined (which requires more skill to make a consistent profit over a long period of time to lead a decent life financially?) I think the answer is trading, sports betting, poker.

Or out of high school for 30 years with a doctorate. Either one works.

You're "half a brain" has been methodically brainwashed by the vertically integrated Securities Industry for what... 17 years now? With no apparent resistance on your part.

Maybe the Guidance Counselor at your High School can stage an Intervention... and enroll you in an intensive Electroshock Deprogramming Halfway House. There's always a ray of hope that people like you can still live a semblance of a normal life. Don't give up.

Here's a good link to get you started:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwGFalTRHDA

Poker is different than the other two when it comes to long-term prospects in the sense that poker games can/do change greatly in difficulty over time on average (certainly the case online), whereas sports betting and trading aren't any harder than they were 20 years ago.

Not to turn this back into the "harder" thing, but I honestly don't see how trading is harder than poker and how it could be "not even close." I don't do it myself, but I work for a guy who does so I'm close to it. He profits a little, and he's a complete idiot. If he played poker he'd be destroyed.

In poker, you have a set of guys hand after hand all trying to get the same thing (the pot) in the same way (by making the best hand or the best bet).

In trading though, you have a huge population affecting the price of the stock all doing different things. Some are shorting, some are long, some are buying/selling intraday, some are holding. The market is being pulled in every possible direction, by every possible type of transaction. So in the short term, it's basically random. All you have to do is manage that randomness.

"Random" seems a lot easier to me than "everyone bent in the same direction, PLUS an insurmountable lack of information."

Maybe trading just hasn't clicked with the people who say trading is harder?

At the very least there's no equivalent to the blinds in trading. You can pick your spots, and you never HAVE to make a trade simply to keep yourself from bleeding off money. You can sit there all month and wait for your pitch. You can do nothing but play AA and KK.

Hardest to beat does not = highest skill factor. A game like rouelette would be next to impossible to beat for any period of time. But if you happened to do it, it certainly wouldn't mean it took a great deal of skill.

Certain people in this thread seem to be missing this (obvious) point.

Poker is a lot more time consuming than sports betting so perhaps that clouds my judgment. However, imo sports betting is still the easiest way to earn an extra low five figures per year and involves less time commitment and risk than poker. I stand by this statement, but won't elaborate further.

lol at the poll results

obv most 2p2'rs are clueless about trading

Trading > Poker > Sports Betting ftw

sports betting is probably the easiest by far. If you look at spreads, they are designed to split the bets, not an actual prediction of the game. So i'm guessing ayone who knows anything about sportsbetting probably looks for the spreads that are vastly different than the predicted outcome of the game.

Market trading is probably the hardest since prices are extremely efficient and accurate to the actual real time value.

Poker is as hard as the people you play and I really don't think you can compare it to the other two.