The Same Animal in a Better Suit
He kept telling me it was not gambling. Mostly he was telling himself.
There is a fellow who comes in Tuesday mornings for coffee and never touches a table. Retired from thirty years of doing other people's taxes. He likes to tell me he has never gambled a dollar in his life, and he says it the way a man says he has never had a drink, standing in a bar.
A few weeks back I noticed his phone flat on the counter, and him checking it every minute or so. Red numbers, green numbers. He had a look on his face I have not seen since the card rooms, and I mean that exactly. The jaw. The little private math. The refresh.
He caught me watching and said, this is not gambling, Sal. This is the market. He had been in and out of some stock three times before lunch, and he showed me the screen like a kid showing a report card.
They called me The Closer on the road because I could tell when a man was finished before he could. It was never the cards that told me. It was the face. And his face was the face of a man down money he had not admitted to being down.
So I asked him the only question I know for this. If it goes against you today, what happens tomorrow? He started to answer. Well, tomorrow I go a little bigger and get back to even, and then. And then he heard it. He stopped right in the middle of the sentence, and we stood there while it landed.
That is the tell, friend. It is not the app or the ticker or whether the thing has a name from the business pages. It is the getting back to even. A hole in a brokerage account is the same hole I dug in basements for twenty years. The chase just wears a suit now.
I told him I know nothing about markets and I never will. But I know action. If the money moves fast and your heart moves with it, and losing makes you want to go bigger instead of go home, it does not matter what the sign on the door says.
He still comes Tuesdays. The phone stays in his coat, mostly. Some weeks that is the whole victory, and I have learned to count it. If your screen has that kind of hold on you, the folks at 1-800-MY-RESET talk to traders too.
Same animal. Better suit.
Sal
Day trading can work exactly like gambling when money moves fast and the goal becomes winning back losses. The warning sign is not the platform but the urge to get back to even, and it deserves the same help a gambling problem does.