Reflecting an amalgam of economics, monetary, and psychological factors, the stock market represents possibly the most subtly intricate game invented by man.

From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true.

A weakness of the random-walk model lies in its assumption of instantaneous adjustment, whereas the information impelling a stock market toward its "intrinsic value" gradually becomes disseminated throughout the market place.

There are no conventional games involving conditions of uncertainty without risk.

While no rigorous proof of an optimal strategy has been achieved, Robbins has proposed the principal of "staying on a winner" and has shown it to be uniformly better than a strategy of random selection.

The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result.

The essence of the phenomenon of gambling is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies.