Trading is very much like gambling. If you just love the thrill of it, you’ll rely on superstitions or gut feelings or intuition or whatever you make up in your head and the house will always win. That’s why the gaming industry exists. But if it’s your business, you’ll play the odds, use your head, and eventually come out on top. Those who make money consistently through gambling are not truly gamblers. They are more like traders. Skilled players in a game of odds that they know how to turn to their own advantage.

Trading is a game of skill. Traders stand to make (or lose) a lot of money in the near future as volatility heats up. Buy the dips and sell the rallies short term and you might make some nice gains. Investing though, is a game of confidence and patience. If you’re freefalling without a parachute, you will hit the ground. It might take awhile but there is no other alternative. If you see it happening you can invest in, say, lots of pillows. Meanwhile, you have to deal with all the talking heads who say everything is fine. That you’ve been in freefall for years and nothing bad has come of it. That the law of gravity may be true but by the time we hit the ground we’ll all be dead anyway. That maybe there is no ground at all after all. That the U.S. Federal Budget Deficit as at its highest ever ($779 billion) outside of recession or war reported by the Treasury Department yesterday, but that’s just normal and will keep going on forever.

Did anyone notice how rates ticked up again to session highs in the final hour of trading in the U.S. as equities fell back down to session lows?

So you wait. Sometimes for years. And you start to second guess yourself. Are we really falling? What if we’re just floating? What if the law of gravity isn’t real? What if the talking heads are right and everything is just fine? Unlike a trader who can more easily admit he was wrong on some technical read and try again, an investor, if he wants to change an approach, must fundamentally change worldviews.