Investing..

[SupremeGOAT]

I ran into an old classmate the other day in a supermarket. While we were waiting in line we chatted for a bit and he told me his "job" was trading futures. I had no idea what he was talking about at the time but i knew that wasn't a normal job... i asked him if he was able to survive off it alone and he said he had multiple portfolios with diversified investments that provided enough passive income for him to get by just fine... i told him i'd look into it. I know the basics of  investing thanks to https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/investment-vehicles-tutorial however it seems there are other major branches of Investing i didn't get into. Forex Trading, Binary Options, Stock Trading, Dividend Investing, Futures Trading etc etc... I understand that trading stocks is a skill and if you don't know what your are doing you could wreck yourself, you can mitigate losses by creating hedges but at its core isn't it the same as gambling? for simplicity's sake look at Binary Options, to me that looks like gambling... a lower risk type of gambling but still gambling if you look at it objectively. I have no problems with gambling its just that, you guys think its a skill worth INVESTING in? Can something as deceptively simple as binary options or Forex trading be lucrative to the point of rendering a 9to5 moot?

[Nicnac]

honestly Forex and that stuff always seemed like a ripoff to me. especially since you need to have a broker to go through which costs money. There are certainly people and even more so companies that make money off it but someone getting into it just to check it out will certainly be taken out in no time... Shares on the other side, especially ETFs are a great tool to leverage your savings but we are talking 10+ years of holding those at least. 

Everyone has someone who knows someone who trades for a living but I never really trusted that. I also wouldn't wanna live with the risk all the time.