Is it gambling or certainty..?

As more people think about randomness of financial instrument, more and more people argue whether investing in financial world is gambling or not.., well again as you may guess my answer would be both, depend on what part you want to take in this world.

There are mainly 3 players in investment:

1.Speculator:
If you insist investment is gambling then it is the right one for you, speculator is simply speculate for their payoff.
they profit depend on market movement, for those who take position in buy they hope market will bullish(increase) and sell at higher price, and the opposite way for those who take the sell position and hoping market will fall(bearish).
however, historically(at least in written history), no one will make consistently positive payoff, at average you will be very close to 0 return, most of the time people will exit the market because of their big loss and they cant hold on anymore, while people in high profit position tend to play more and more until bankruptcy, leaving Everyone with negative return for most of the time.
From my point of view, if you do this it just mean you enter another variation of casino game, you could name other that it: soccer bet, roulette, etc. Again, its not recommended.

2. Hedger:
New term for some people, its method is quite well known in investment world as hedging, basically it protect your capital for market movement against you. Example will always provide nice interpretation, suppose you want to trade in gold with stranger (btw, you are in Indonesia using rupiah and stranger is from US using $). in 1 week both of you agree to trade 100 grams of gold for 1000 dollar, you are buyer and stranger is seller.
What will you do? easiest way is to provide 1000$ now and wait a week and pay him the money for the gold. this method easy, however it is unlikely done because people like to circulate their money before they using it, hoping it would grow before it is used, deposit in bank and take the interest is just an example.Again to remind you, this example use 1 week time of period, what happen if we agree in 6 months, 1 year or even 10 years? providing 1000$ now will be like sacrifice all the opportunity in time between.
Another strategy is just provide 1000$ later in a week, wait 1 week, meet the stranger and pay it, done!! is it? remember you are in Indonesia, in 1 week you have to bring rupiah to currency converter and ask for 1000 dollar, what if in 1 week rupiah get weak in respect with dollar? then you have to provide more rupiah to get 1000$, you dont want it. what you want is rupiah getting stronger. now you choose, if you want to speculate about it, do nothing and wait for 1 week. if you want to assure what amount you should provide, do hedging(to remind you again that we talk about hedger not speculator). How? you make agreement with another stranger , call it stranger II, that in 1 week he would provide you 1000$ for fix rupiah, say 9.000.000 rupiah (using 1$=9.000 of course). and you can stop worrying about what happen in 1 week, its stranger II problem, none of your business :). Is stranger II exist? fortunately yes, it is known as a product called "future" or "forward", actually it is not the same but the idea is similar.
The question is can you imagine how big is hedging world? it is everywhere, bank to protect their capital, insurance company to protect their client, government to protect their people, thats why there exist such unit called treasury, risk management.

3. Arbitrageur: It act like speculator with different reason, it sure that his position will give profit payoff. As most of people believe in equilibrium, that every asset should stay in its price, while most of the time we see that all asset price will deviate, or called volatile(it is the reason to introduce randomness in modeling the asset price movement). Arbitrageur could interpret if stock price is not at its equilibrium and take the opportunity, although its not as good as it seems, competition in market demand player to be able to execute in very short time, millisecond, otherwise the opportunity went away taken by other player. thanks to computer that make all the flash-trading happen, also blame the computer that make todays trading is getting more complicate.

After All, sometimes you could have more than 1 role at a time from this 3 position.I also think all things in the world will be speculation, you open a company, you speculate in customer behavior, product trend, political situation. you buy food, you speculate with its taste, whether it satisfy you or not.but if you have to deal with speculation, try to manage your risk, get as small as possible. Take risk that you can handle.