>>99506287I see, but let me give you a different explanation:
Most of the time when you trade its with a computer from a multi-billion dollar firm that have calculated certain prices to sell at. You just need to decide if that stock will go up or down in the long term, about 2+ years.
Secondly, the money doesnt disappear when stocks go down. When one stock is sold, usually another stock or bond is bought. So money that exited last month might be back in the market the next month.
In addition to that, companies are constantly added to the market which increases its over all value. For example Valve is a multi-billion dollar company but its not even on the market because its private. The market only represents a fraction of all companies (though usually most of the biggest ones).
And the market goes up because of business growth. More products are sold, more people buy things, companies invent new products. Actual things are being made in most companies and thats what gives the company values (along with expected growth in profits).
It is true that most stocks are speculative nowadays, but certain stocks have higher or lower risk (for example an oil company is low risk and a new tech start up is high risk).
ETFs (exchange traded funds) make risk management easier, they are basically just a collection of a group of stocks old as a single unit, so its good for just getting the average return of a specific market segment.
Anyways, food for thought. Someone needs to teach vtubers!
