ETA!!!
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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I'm no economist, but isn't the stock market more an indicator of what the wealthy think will happen in the near future?
The stock market is just a way for people with more money to slowly take money away from people with less money, while the people with less money feel like they have a chance of winning. For poor people it is basically gambling, and for rich people it is basically owning the casino.
There are so many built-in structures to the way it operates to favour the flow of money to larger holders over time.
Also it's only slow for the rich people, for the poor people it can happen in an instant.
A stock price isn't "money". It is, literally, a price tag. The price of a stock going up does not take actual money out of anyone's wallet.
If my $5 baseball card becomes worth $100 as time passes while I continue to possess it, do you seriously believe I've now done the equivalent of stealing $95?
Your baseball card became worth more because more of them got lost or destroyed over time so it got more rare. So the increase in value came from all the people that lost their 5 dollar card. And also partially from inflation.
Completely different from the stock market.
The money from the stock market comes primarily from other investors. You may not be directly taking it from them, but there are only a few layers of abstraction between them putting money into a stock that went down and you taking money out of a stock that went up.
But the main advantage rich people have in the stock market is less latency in their trades and more weight to swing around. Not to mention being much more likely to have insider info, but even without actually cheating they have quite a few advantages that tip it in their favour.
Assumption. That can happen because the athlete has a very good season, or even becomes famous/infamous for an unrelated reason.
In other words, you're assuming it's because supply went down, but it can also be that demand went up. Or a combination.
But that's beside the point, which is that its value changing has zero impact on what's in others' wallets. Because it's a price tag. Not an amount of actual money.
But, once the valuation is realized.... then it has done all the things I said. So yes, if you only ever buy stocks and never sell them, you have never gained money that came from somewhere else... but you also haven't become rich then.