Hey everyone, Daryam Woods here. Happy holidays. For the next week, we're running some of our

favorite shows from this year. Today's episode is about gambling addiction and the stock market.

NPR. Chris Gava got interested in the stock market around 2010.

I had some savings and I thought there's no point in them being in, you know, saving

his accounts because the interest was so bad.

Chris started with what he describes as a sensible investment strategy.

He bought shares in a range of large companies listed on the main British stock exchange.

But the deeper I got into it, you start going into forums and people start recommending stocks

and you see some of the returns that were happening.

And then that kind of opened up another world.

It was a world of buying smaller, more volatile companies

or using special trading contracts in ways that magnify your gains or losses.

Chris remembers investing in one company prospecting for oil.

News hit over a new discovery, and in two days I'd made over 80,000 pounds, and I thought, right,

you know, I can make some serious money here.

80,000 pounds is about 100,000 US dollars. And Chris saw what he was doing as investing, an intellectual

hobby on the side of his day job in digital media. What he didn't think was that his trading could be

gambling. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods.

Buying and selling quickly on the stock market is known as day trading.

And with the dawn of apps like Robin Hood and Weeble, winning or losing fortunes is easier than ever.

So is day trading gambling? Today on the show, we hear Chris's story and we speak with a neuro-economist about the human brain on day trading.

After his big win, Chris Gava started to lose money on his investments.

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