Wall Street’s Casino on Steroids

It wasn’t that long ago when investment haters referred to the stock market as Wall Street’s Casino.

Ironically (or NOT) today you could say that it has become a Las Vegas style Casino on steroids.

Cue Up: Trading platforms geared towards turning market outcomes into wager-like products.

Today you can:

• Trade options on the stock

• Leveraged ETFs tracking the stock

• Tokenized versions of the stock at 2 a.m.

• And prediction-market contracts on whether or not Joe Kernen is wearing a toupee when he reports on the stock

Wall Street and Las Vegas used to be different places.

Not anymore.

And new reporting from The Wall Street Journal confirms it.

The WSJ reported that Charles Schwab is preparing to enter the prediction market business through a partnership with CBOE.

According to the report, Schwab customers will soon be able to trade binary-style contracts* tied to the performance of the S&P 500.

(*Note: Binary-style contracts sound like something that morphed out of the O’Biden Administration’s Pride month celebrations)

The contracts’ function much like prediction market wagers.

In Plain English…traders make a yes-or-no bet on whether an index finishes above or below a certain level and receive either a fixed payout or nothing at all.

Kinda like black-jack, roulette, and numerous other Vegas style wagers.

Wall Street’s Casino

The distinction between investing and gambling is becoming harder and harder to identify.

Especially when you consider:

• Prediction markets have exploded over the last several years

• Sports betting has become ubiquitous

• Options volumes continue to reach extraordinary levels

• Crypto exchanges offer leverage that would have seemed insane a decade ago

• Every event, every opinion, every outcome increasingly becomes something that can be traded

• And sometimes it’s tough to remember there’s actual company equity at the bottom of the pile of all this speculative garbage somewhere

Unfortunately, every event is now a market.

Every opinion is now a wager.

Every moment of boredom can be monetized by putting MONEY AT RISK ON YOUR PHONE.

And here’s the real problem… society doesn’t become stronger by turning every aspect of life into a wager.

A society becomes stronger by rewarding patience, discipline, craftsmanship, productivity, delayed gratification, and long-term thinking.

Those are the traits that build companies, families, institutions, communities, and civilizations.

But instead, we have normalized endless money printing and financial engineering instead of productive growth.

We have rewarded speculation over investment.

We have encouraged debt over savings.

We have elevated social media influencers over experts, virality over wisdom, and instant gratification over patience.

We’ve built social media platforms designed to monetize outrage, anger and confrontation political systems incapable of long-term planning, and financial products that increasingly resemble casino games.

And now we’re building twenty-four-hour prediction markets on top of all of it.

Confused yet?

Don’t be.

Instead, learn how to prosper AND thrive the old-fashioned way…especially in Turbulent Times (HERE).

Share this with a friend…especially if they’re hooked on Sports betting and/or using Kalshi.  They’ll thank YOU later.

And tell them:

We’re Not Just About Finance

But we use finance to give you hope.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

~John 8:32~