You are provided a career choice: become a gambler or a brain surgeon.   As a gambler, you play games of chance ranging from slot machines to sports betting to lotteries.  As a brain surgeon, you perform procedures like craniotomies and neuro endoscopies.  The average brain surgeon’s expected lifetime earnings are about $16,400,000.  The average gambler’s lifetime earnings are harder to pin down and are often negative. But the lucky gambler can make vastly more in one night – winning the $1 billion-plus in Powerball – than fifty lifetimes of brain surgery.

The gambler-brain surgeon difference can apply to stock-market investing and trading.  You can view the stock market as a casino or something close to it, where you place your bets on stocks that, for whatever reason, you feel will explode in price.  Your sources of information can be online influencers cocktail party tips, or virtually anything.  You might strike it super-rich, but over time the odds are against you.

Alternatively, you can view the stock market from the brain surgeon’s perspective.  You spend time developing a systematic approach to investing or trading, based on what you can and cannot control.  The odds are in favor of your doing well, possibly very well, over time, but assumedly against the rock-star explosive wins that the gambling speculator might capture.

How would you like to invest or trade – as a gambler or brain surgeon?

I would prefer being the gambler: more fun and glamor, less work, the possibility of massive wins – and I love pumping my adrenalin.  Except for one thing.

It’s true that with investing and trading, there are many variables, particularly in the short-run, that you can’t control.  Some of these are new unforeseen storms and forces that howl into the markets with scary consequences.   These uncontrollable and unknown elements definitely give the stock markets a casino-like flavor.

But if you train brain-surgeon-like, which means developing a workable approach to investing or trading, controlling and knowing what you can and acknowledging what you can’t, and implementing with discipline (like a brain surgeon, whom we hope is disciplined), then you have a BETTER than good chance of doing exceedingly well, making vastly more money than the highest percentile of gamblers.

So, with all due respect to the millions of investing and trading gamblers out there, I personally choose the brain surgeon approach.