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The story
A simple question — “Why don’t people who play pachinko and bet on horse races just invest in stocks instead?” — touched off a heated debate between the investing camp and the gambling camp on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G (“Live News”) board. Some pushed stocks, pointing to the Nikkei’s 26% and 31% annual gains and the gulf between pachinko’s roughly 20% house cut and the near-zero fees of online brokerages. Others shot back with lines like “poor people should stick to poor people’s gambling” and “I’m not trying to climb the social ladder,” revealing that for them gambling was never about profit but the thrill of play itself — leaving the two sides talking past each other.
What people said
Why would you deliberately do something with such a low expected value?
Anyone with real money obviously already invests, this comes up every single time.
Investing is gambling too, dude.
Only the expected value is different.
Even large-cap stocks have been popping 10% easily lately.
Miss a place bet and your ticket's worthless paper.
With stocks, even if you're wrong, waiting it out can turn things around into a profit.
So idiots end up paying both the "pachinko tax" and an "inflation tax" for not investing in stocks?
stocks actually leave you worse off than horse racing or pachinko.
Huh? No they don't.
Day-trade on full margin and stocks can multiply many times over in one shot too, you know.
That's just a different thing from stocks.
You can pick your own individual stocks too, though.
Stocks' edge basically comes down to the fact that share prices keep going up over the long run.
In pachinko terms, it's like the payout rate being set above 4 yen per ball —
actually sitting there racking up balls is a whole separate issue.
For starters, the house cut is totally different.
Pachinko parlors skim about 20%, so bet 100 yen and you only get 80 back on average.
With stocks, online brokerages barely charge fees, so the "house" takes almost nothing.
Of course it's positive.
The Nikkei was up 26% last year and 31% this year.
Just buying a boring old ETF gets you gains like that.
People who bought Kioxia made dozens of times their money.
The return rate on the spring G1 races is over 1000%, though.
What, got a problem with that?
Then bring an actual counterargument.
Well sure, if you want to believe stocks aren't skimming a cut off you, go right ahead.
They work hard to make you think that.
With pachinko, even on a brutal day you're only out a bit over 100,000 yen, so it's still playable.
You already know this — neither horse racing nor stocks can cost you more than what you staked.
Spoken like someone who's never actually traded stocks (a classic "airprei," 5ch slang for talking big about something you've never actually done).
The only gambling where you can actually pin down a fixed number like that is slots, since there's no chaos factor involved.
Expected value is the basic foundation of every kind of gambling.
Not understanding that just makes you an idiot and easy prey 🦆
Poor people should just stick to poor people's gambling.
Acting rich doesn't make you rich.
Stocks actually give poor people a better shot at climbing up in the world — so why go out of your way to play pachinko or bet on horses instead?
I'm not climbing anywhere.
That was never the goal to begin with.
Even with stocks you're not climbing up in the world.
You can't just pop in and be done in two minutes like at the pachinko parlor.
Once you've got an account set up, buying and selling is easy.
With stocks you don't even need to go anywhere — you can do it from home, or honestly anywhere, anytime, right on your phone.
No different from a pachinko addict (pachinkasu, mocking slang for pachinko junkies) celebrating after hitting a lucky trigger.
Nope.
This is a major bull run that's going to last for decades.
Japan has entered an era of inflation, so skip stocks and you'll just get hit with an inflation tax.
It's incredibly fun, actually.
The dopamine hits are insane.
Maybe someone should build a dedicated trading app with flashy pachinko-style animations for people like that.
Let's just sit back and enjoy watching what happens to the people who stubbornly refuse to touch stocks.
But isn't investing something the government itself recommends?
That's beside the point.
A true gambler owns everything that happens to them.
If you don't invest, you're finished.
Which is exactly why it's more fun not to recommend it.
Background and Key Points
Pachinko occupies a strange legal space in Japan: outright gambling for cash is illegal, so parlors pay out steel balls that players exchange for prizes at a separate counter, a loophole that lets an industry estimated to move tens of trillions of yen a year operate openly. Horse racing, by contrast, is legal parimutuel betting run by the Japan Racing Association, with takeout rates (the house’s cut) typically in the 20-30% range depending on bet type. Both stand in sharp contrast to the stock market, where the Nikkei 225’s back-to-back 20%+ gains and Japan’s post-2024 shift into a mild-inflation, negative-real-rate environment have made “put your money in an index fund instead” a mainstream talking point, amplified by the government’s own tax-free NISA investment scheme aimed at exactly this kind of household saver.
The thread didn’t actually split over math — nobody seriously disputed that stocks carry a better expected value than pachinko or horse betting. It split over what the money is for. The investing camp treated gambling as a suboptimal wealth-building tool; the gambling camp insisted they were never trying to build wealth, they were paying for two minutes of dopamine, and measuring that against a fund’s expected value misses the point entirely.
What’s conspicuously absent is any mention of NISA by name, even though it’s the government program built precisely to nudge small-time gamblers into the market — several posters gesture at “the government wants you to invest” without naming the actual policy vehicle for it.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Why don’t people who play pachinko and bet on horse races just invest in stocks?.”
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