No, he never did receive real treatment. I was able to get him to ban himself from the casino for 3 years and then another 3 years after that. We're at the point where I feel safe he won't step back into the casino and accepted his loss.
Iam really afraid of going through those dark times again. What starts of small quickly can quickly get out of hand. He says he plans to make $50 a day which sounded very similar to playing $20 hands at the casino at first.
I feel like I may be the enabler in his problems and Iam afraid to approach him because I already know how he will react. I feel stuck. At least our bank account are seperate. Iam not sure what to do at the moment... Iv tried sharing my knowledge in investing long term but that's failed. I guess my only option is to protect myself. What else can one do?
This is gambling under a thin veneer of respectability. Someone with previous gambling issues should know better than to play with activating those circuits again. Did he ever get real treatment, or attend any support group meetings?
This is an alcoholic deciding they're going to become a sommelier. It will not end well. You're not overreacting.
I worked for a fund where we used lots of strategies, day trading being one of them, along with other time frames ...
I can say the following ... all the traders I have met in my life, not a single one of them has ever played in a casino. Why? Because we know it's a game of negative expectancy (mathematical fancy way of saying it is a losing game)... the stacks are against you.
The fact your SO didn't realize this ever and fell prey, I fear that he would fall on other fallacies - which are very numerous - in the trading/investing world ...
If adding $$ to a losing ETF of a broad market is fine and actually desirable in a DCA strategy, doing so in individual instruments - like a stock - can lead you to blow up your portfolio or worse all your savings ...
I have seen a bunch of people that invested in big name household companies that were deemed as impossible to fail - and people invested because "Hey it's fallen 60% already it cannot fall much more..." only to see the same stock fall 60% 5 more times, and some even reach completely to 0.
A lot of the fallacies is just that, the aversion of a loss, makes the person add more money into a "falling knife" in order to recover from that loss quicker - if I bought at 50 and it's now at 20 ... let's double down and put more money and lower the average price, then the stock only needs to go up 30% instead of 150% in order to break even..."
Such reasonings, are a recipe for disaster...
And believe me, gambling is a really really disaster thing... My stepfather , well ex stepfather, was/is a gambler ... and he has wasted/spent hunderds of thousands!
I second the whole thing of checking your assets and a double signature accounts... my stepfather, for example, after being interdict from accounts and all assets in a company, he used a land that was in his sole name, and sold it without anyone knowing... he blew it in a week!
It was 500k that land was sold...
Of course my mother divorced him after many times to try to recover him... I felt really bad because I truly really liked him and he was the nicest guy - we are still good friends and I see him everytime i go back to my country - but I understood my mother's perspective.
Also, my great uncle, he pretty much blew my grandmothers fortune away gambling as well... My family had a castle in Europe, and since he was the elder son, my grandmother being woman at the time, didn't have authority ... He gambled the family's castle away ...
Day trading is fine if you know what you are doing, however, with his past behaviour I would say his chances of ever making it are very slim... if chances are already slim for majority of people, I can't even imagine for someone that has a gambler's mentality. The risk is too high, especially if he has access to margin.