It's just gambling for us. For politicians doing legal insider trading, it's a reliable source of wealth.

Is it gambling you're the one setting the deck?

Now with the rest of us not privy to inside info or pre-emptively leveraging on the levers of power it is gambling. Horrific odds too as fundementals don't seem to mean a damned thing anymore. I litterally have better returns playing the known odds in scratch off tickets.

The richest idiots in the world run companies that have NO PROFIT. The companies that do churn a profit and seem to do well end up getting shorted to death. I used to make money in stocks - or at least knew enough to follow indicators to make money. There were idicators that basically told you when things were too hyped or too low.

The last time I made money was when the anti people attacked Disney and drove the stock price artifically low. Then it bounced right back when they moved on to thier next target (which seems to be smaller and smaller game companies with no public facing stock now .

But we never really recovered from 2008. The faded employee rights laminated poster at work still has the Federal Minimum wage at $7.25 last updated 2009. 13 years ago.

I think 2014-2016 was the final nail in the coffin on fundamentals working. We are overdue for a dose of reality. They can't keep the artifical JOY up forever. Last few years I've switched my investing money to mostly precious metals and CDs. They aren't going to make me huge gains, but those aren't going to drop 20-80% loss because the Empire gets butthurt someone did it better so they leverage shorts (which should be illegal) to choke a company to death. Space mining could have happened by now but they are choking NASA because I swear they found a Golden Nugget up there and they must maintain artifical scarcity.

There are ways to get returns reliably. The total US market increased through the great depression, the world wars, etc. In my mind, if your total market index fund loses significantly, you're in a brave new world where your USD isn't going to help you much either. The only reason the government does stuff today is to make that money line go up and make sure those companies get to burn through all the resources of the world with nothing to show for it without suffering financial consequences.

Individual stocks are gambling unless you have foresight like a member of congress knowing that the next round of patch notes is going to nerf a company really big.

It's not just gambling. Sometimes it's astrology.