Like I said, I only really play for fun and not for cash, so I prefer low-stakes home games (I have a group of friends I like to play with), so as such I'm not too familiar with the casino environment, but I've never heard about "picking the right day to go". I'm assuming it has to do with one of the many superstitions that seasoned gamblers tend to have. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I tend to look down on superstitions like that.
In my opinion, a very big part of becoming good at poker is recognizing that it's ultimately a game of chance and you can't fully control the outcome. If you're serious about improving how you play, you simply have to accept that sometimes you'll do everything right and still lose money. (And, likewise, you can play terribly and still win.) This is often referred to as not being "results-oriented".
That being said, though, if you're feeling especially emotional (maybe you just lost a really big hand and you REALLY want to make that money back), it might be a good idea to avoid playing, as you'll be less likely to think objectively about the game and may make poor decisions. This is often called being "tilted". So, in that sense, if you wake up one morning and are just not feeling great about gambling, maybe it would be wise to take a rain check. Statistically speaking, you're just as likely to get good cards whether or not you think you will, but if you're unsure about gambling or think you may make poor decisions, I say trust your gut.
Alright, so now onto stocks.
First off, if all you want to do is make money follow these steps:
1. Download Robinhood and set up an account
2. Go to the search bar and type in "SPY", you should see a result called "SPDR S&P 500 ETF". Tap on this and buy as many shares as you can reasonably afford.
3. Delete Robinhood and forget about the stock market for 10-50 years
Congratulations! You are now more profitable than 70% of Wall Street investors.
(Obviously if you're outside of the US, you may have to modify this guide slightly, but buying and holding a market-tracking ETF is still a good general strategy. Also, I only really recommended Robinhood to be facetious, if you actually want to invest long-term like this, you're much better off getting an IRA or 401(k) at an established broker and buying SPY or a similar ETF there, usually you can buy most of the popular index funds commission-free in these types of accounts.)
However, if you're more interested in fucking around with stocks than you are with making the most money possible, just get a Robinhood account (contrary to what I previously said, Robinhood actually is pretty good for this), put a small amount of money in it (maybe $300-$1k), and go nuts! (With only a few caveats.) Don't day-trade unless you have to (excessive day-trading will actually risk your account being shut down by the SEC, but Robinhood by default will prevent you from doing this). And, stay away from options and leverage (I'm not even going to go into what these are, just know that if you had enough money for either of these to be a remotely good idea, you could also easily afford to hire an actual expert to help you manage your money who isn't just some rando on a shrooms forum). I'll try to give some general advice (as well as explain why I think the above strategy is the best for making money), but in my opinion the best way to learn is by doing, and as long as you follow those two simple rules, it'll be very hard to lose a significant amount of money. (although you should also be aware that making a lot of trades may make doing your taxes a real pain in the ass if you can't afford a CPA)
So, before I get to the actual advice, I think we should quickly go over what the stock market actually is. The stock market is essentially the living embodiment of our capitalist economy, a system Marx defined as the "existence of private property". Now, due to the fact that Marx wrote his treatise on capitalism over 130 years ago, in German, a lot of his terminology is... outdated, to say the least. As such, many people misinterpret this as meaning that capitalism is a system where people are allowed to own things. However, when you take into account the true meaning behind his words, his definition is actually quite apt. You see, when Marx refers to "private property", he doesn't mean the ownership of a toothbrush or a loaf of bread (this he would consider "personal property"), rather, he means the individual ownership of economic power (or, as Marx would call it, the "means of production"). Stocks are, in fact, the exact way by which economic power can be "owned" under capitalism, and the stock market is simply the forum in which this economic power is traded. And, in fact, the stock market works just like any other market, those "playing the market" seek to profit off of fluctuations in the prices people are willing to buy and sell certain commodities at. The only difference is that, in the stock market, the "commodity" is a share of control over the global economy.
Now, this is all very abstract and philisophical, and although I promise that abstract view of the stock market will be important later, for now let's take a more practical look at it. Say you and a couple of friends have a business idea. You noticed that your town doesn't have a cheap source of furniture, despite being situated right next to a large lumber mill. You realize that, if you were to build a factory in an empty lot, you could purchase lumber from the lumber mill and mass-produce furniture that you could sell to your neighbors for a nice profit. However, you don't have nearly enough money to afford this plot of land, much less to build a factory, hire skilled workers, and keep the lights on long enough to make your first sale. You need an investor. After asking around, you find a rich man (let's call him Jim), who agrees that your venture will be profitable, and offers to give you enough money to set up your factory in exchange for 30% of your furniture company. You incorporate, and your new company is split up into quanta of ownership called "shares". Jim gets 30% of the shares, and you and your friends get the rest. You build the factory and very quickly start making money. That money (and the factory itself) is collectively owned by all of you, according to how you distributed the shares, and you can collectively decide (in a manner described by the articles of incorporation) how the corporation is run and what is done with its funds. You can even decide to start paying yourselves out of the company's coffers (this practice is called paying "dividends" to a company's shareholders). You could also sell your shares of the company to someone else for a quick profit.
And that brings us to a practical description of the stock market. In a sentence, the stock market is a public exchange where shares of control over corporations can be bought and sold. Not all corporations are "publicly traded" (i.e. their shares are bought and sold on a public exchange), but most of the big companies you're familiar with probably are.
So, as a stock trader, your goal is to make money by buying and selling stocks on one of these public exchanges (most likely the New York Stock Exchange, abbreviated as NYSE). In the simplest view of things, you want to buy a stock on the exchange, and then sell it at a higher price than you bought it for. In general, the way you'll do this is by assessing the stock's underlying value and comparing it to the stock's price. Now, although there certainly are objective things about a company that can make its shares more or less valuable (e.g. profitability, potential for growth, etc.), but "value" is an inherently abstract and nebulous concept, as ultimately stocks are only as valuable as the price somebody is willing to pay for them. The longer you trade stocks, though, the better you'll get at recognizing when the market is over-valuing or under-valuing a stock.
One recent example from my own trading experience was when Texas Instruments, a very solid semiconductor company, released a negative earnings report (i.e., they told the public that they'd made less money than they had in the previous financial quarter) during a time when investors were very worried about economic collapse. The stock's price plummeted. From my previous experience, I was confused, since I knew that TI was a good company and I'd seen plenty of companies decrease in profit by far more than TI and have their stock prices fall less. This made me suspicious, so I downloaded TI's earnings report and started looking through it, to try and see why investors were dropping it like a hot potato. Upon reading the report, I realized that the reason that TI had been less profitable this quarter was that they paid off a large amount of payroll debt (companies will often elect to take on debt to pay their employees instead of paying them with cash from their coffers, the idea being that they can instead invest this capital in ventures that will provide greater returns than the loan's interest). In fact, TI's gross earnings had increased from last quarter, and if you ignored the loan payment (which would be a one-time expenditure), their operating costs had decreased as well. Seeing that the market had clearly overreacted to TI's earning's report, I bought shares in TI and, about a week later, the stock price jumped back up past what it was before the earnings report and I made a nice profit.
If every person trading on the stock market was perfectly rational and fully informed, then the market would at all times provide an exact representation of each individual stock's value and it would be impossible to make any money off of short-term trading. As the previous example illustrates, however, that is hardly the case. Human beings are emotional and irrational beings, especially where their money is concerned. And, even the best computational trading algorithm frequently makes mistakes. So, there's plenty of room to profit off of other people's mistakes. In other words, unlike investing, short-term trading is a zero-sum game. If you make money on a trade, it means that somebody else could have made that money and you made it instead of them. So, how do you make sure you're on the winning side of as many trades as possible? To paraphrase a quote I once heard, to make money on a trade, you have to either be lucky, outsmart the competition, or be the first one to act on new information. Now, unless you have the resources of a massive investment firm, you're probably never going to manage to be the smartest or the first person to act on new information in the market. But, trust me, there are plenty of very dumb and very slow people out there you can still profit off of.
Now, there's no cut-and-dry formula I can give you for how to make money on the stock market (and if I had one, I certainly wouldn't be giving out for free to random people on the internet), but I can tell you that the market almost always overreacts. If a stock starts dropping, people will sell it purely out of the fear that it will keep dropping, and likewise if a stock is climbing people will buy it in the hopes it climbs further. If you see something happening in a stock's price, ask yourself why you think it's happening. Did the company release a negative earnings report? Was there a recent shortage of the product the company supplies? Did a cat walk across a hedge fund manager's keyboard? You can never know for sure, but do your best to figure it out and then ask yourself if you think the stock is at a reasonable price given the underlying cause for the market fluctuation. If it is, wait a while until the market inevitably reaches an unreasonable price, and then buy or sell accordingly. This is obviously a difficult thing to do, and I can virtually guarantee you that you will make mistakes, especially when you're starting out. But, the longer you trade, the more you'll start to get an eye for these sorts of things. And, pretty soon, you'll notice your account balance slowly inching up.
However, although it's relatively easy to be profitable while trading, due to the zero-sum-game nature of the market, it's actually extremely difficult to be more profitable than the market as a whole (the quantity by which your returns exceed those of the entire market is called "alpha", and is often used as a benchmark of the skill of investors). So that's why, at least for the majority of your investment portfolio, I highly recommend investing in market-tracking index funds like $SPY.
I suppose I should probably explain what an ETF is, if I'm going to recommend you buy into one. An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, is a fund comprised of a collection of stocks that's then bundled into individual shares of the fund and sold on public exchanges with a small fee. (Note that this management fee is an inherent part of the ETF and is different from commission. As such, you don't actually 'pay' the fee directly, as you would with commission, but rather it's priced into your share of the ETF.) In the case of $SPY, these stocks are selected to approximately follow the S&P 500 market index, but there are a variety of different ETFs available, for example ones comprised of stocks from a specific industry, or inverse ETFs that are designed to go up when a certain section of the market goes down, and many more. Now you could, obviously, just buy all the stocks in an ETF yourself and not have to pay a management fee, but this would require a ton of capital to do, so ETFs provide an affordable way to invest your money in a very diversified way, and without all the hassle and research involved in trying to design a well-diversified portfolio. Why spend 2 months researching stocks to build a portfolio containing hundreds of individual stocks when you could take 2 seconds to buy an ETF that, even with the management fee, will perform just as well as (if not better than) your custom-built portfolio.
Now, you might be asking yourself why a diversified portfolio matters. The reason is quite simple, really, when you keep in mind the abstract definition of the stock market I brought up earlier. If you buy a single stock, you're investing in the company that stock partially controls. If that company fails, that share of control becomes worthless. Nobody's going to pay for the right to partially control Blockbuster. But, if you invest in a market-tracking ETF (or build a sufficiently diversified portfolio that represents the market as a whole), then you aren't really investing in any individual companies, you're investing in the stock market itself, i.e. you're investing in capitalism itself.
And capitalism, as a system, is built around perpetual growth. That's what I mean when I say that investing isn't a zero-sum game. To go back to the example of your hypothetical furniture company, you weren't just pulling profit out of thin air. I mean, sure, you were selling your furniture for more than it cost to make it. So, although it's certainly true that your business venture is inherently exploitative, you aren't just buying the wood at a low price and selling it at a higher one. You're buying the wood and transforming it into furniture, a process that creates value. So, although every individual chair your company sells is part of a zero-sum trade (every dollar you make is a dollar out of somebody's pocket), your company is still fundamentally adding value to the global economy. Maybe the access to cheap furniture will allow some other enterprising individual to build a hotel in your town, a hotel that will manage to take your furniture and make far more money off of it than you made from selling it to them. Even though in this situation, your company is the "loser" of the zero-sum trade that is your chair being sold (every dollar the hotel makes with your chair is a dollar you hypothetically could have made had you kept the chair), you are both still able to profit because you both add value at different steps along the production line.
So, if you invest in the market as a whole you are essentially investing in the economy as a whole. And while it's certainly true that the world's economic output can decrease (that's what recessions are, fundamentally), as a whole, due to the intertwined natures of capitalism and human greed, the economy will tend to grow. And, as such, investing in the economy as a whole is a very safe bet. In fact, even in an absolute worst case scenario. Let's say you invested in your 20s in a fund tracking the S&P index in 1928 right before the Great Depression, and then divested 45 years later when you were ready to retire, right after the economic crash of the 70s. You still would have come out ahead of inflation. That's because although the market certainly has its ups and downs, the global market as a whole always trends upward. So, for long-term investing, as long as you're sufficiently diversified (e.g. if you invest in a market-tracking ETF) and wait for a sufficiently long time, you will see positive returns. At least, provided global capitalism as a whole doesn't collapse. But, if that were to happen it's not like your money would be worth anything anyway, so either way you're better off investing it.
So, anyway, that's my very long-winded way of saying "invest in index funds unless you just really want to play around with stock trading, in which case make sure you only fuck around with a small percentage of your overall portfolio." I hope it was at least somewhat helpful
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"We cannot command nature except by obeying her."
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