Are you an investor - or a gambler?

huh, this is damn true many of investor end up behaving like gambler...............Again Fundoo article..............

According to psychologists who study gambling behavior, it's all too easy for an innocent investing habit to swell into a gambling problem if a person is so disposed. Both investing and gambling let you wager big money and win or lose huge sums within minutes. Indeed, it can be difficult for even a professional to know at what point a sincere interest in investing edges over the line and becomes something darker and more compulsive.
What ultimately distinguishes gamblers from investors, says Dr. Marvin Steinberg, executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, is a lack of control. Smart investors may decide to occasionally make big bets on a stock. But they can also go for months without buying a stock or even shuffling their portfolio.
"With any kind of compulsive behavior, you wind up being out of control," says Steinberg. "So if you tell yourself that you're going to do one thing and you wind up doing more, you have a problem. An alcoholic says he'll just have one drink and winds up having 12, a problem gambler goes to the casino with $100 in his wallet and winds up spending $3,000 on his credit card. In the same way, if you put more money into risky investments than you can afford to lose, that's a sign you have a problem."
Other symptoms include an inability to stop trading stocks, even while on vacation, using lots of borrowed money, and indulging in superstitious behavior, such as buying a stock because the symbol reminds you of your dog's name. Steinberg estimates that as many as 5% of investors have a mild to serious gambling problem. "There are Gamblers Anonymous meetings in New York and Chicago that are attended almost exclusively by stock market gamblers," he says. "It's a problem that needs to be taken seriously, but it's not well understood. Brokers don't want their clients to think of the markets as a place where you could become a problem gambler."