alt Hacker NewsELI5 why it's better for you to place a $10,000 bet that, say, GOOG falls below $300 by February 2028, than to bet the same that the Pats win the Super Bowl? They're both gambling.
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I don't think I can make a good ELI5 argument for (or against) that one as-written, because there are multiple differences going on at the same time. For example:
1. When you "lose" shorting a stock your potential loss is infinite, because you might be on the hook to buy (and then give away) GOOG at an arbitrarily high price. In contrast, the super-bowl bet is probably a fixed amount.
2. In the opposite direction, it's hard to see how the Super Bowl bet can really be hedging to reduce how much you're relying on chance in your life... not unless you happen to own a store selling single-team merchandise and you want to limit how much money you might lose if nobody wants to buy it.
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P.S.: Let's flip it around: If we assume shorting GOOG is the same as sports-gambling, then why (AFAIK) has no bookie or casino ever even tried to offer the same kind of bet, where you get $X now but you're obligated to supply $THING later?
Does that absence tell us something about an important difference between them?
You actually raise a great point for regulating high-risk (and recently heavily gamified) options and futures bets more like gambling for retail investors.
There's a legitimate, non-gambling use case: hedging against your existing position in GOOG.
There's no equivalent instrument for sports.
As far as I can tell, binary options on "GOOG below $300 by February 2028" do not exist in the US market. I absolutely think that single-stock binary options are terrible gambling products and should not be allowed.
The thing that I suspect you're intending to describe, a put option expiring in January 2028 (there is no such contract for February) with a break-even at $300, has a different structure which greatly increases its utility for financial purposes and greatly decreases its appeal for gambling. It's hard for a casual bettor to even identify what the correct product is (it was the $355 strike at close of market today, but it may be different tomorrow!), bets are only accepted in increments of $5,500, and your winnings may be minimal unless Google falls either more quickly or more severely. If I'm trying to hedge my Google exposure, though, I'm perfectly happy with the scenario where I didn't win much because Google didn't go down much.
The fact that you can turn useful financial instruments into a casino isn't really a great argument for just leaning into it by abandoning all connection to any real utility.