[kjksf]

Opening a restaurant is riskier than investing in stocks and way more work.

Investing in individual stocks (what you call "gambling") is more risky than investing in S&P 500 but that's the trade off. More risk leads to more reward (or more loss).

If you invest in AAPL (or AMZN or GOOG or FB or NFLX) at the right time, you will 10x your money in under 10 years.

Is investing in any of those companies "gambling"?

And sure, you can also loose money, but "data from the BLS shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open" so you can also loose money opening a business and yet we're not name calling people who open restaurants "gamblers".

[pjc50]

Buy-and-hold a major traded company is not gambling. Day trading, and options trading especially, looks a lot more like it.

> yet we're not name calling people who open restaurants "gamblers"

In one of those situations your hard work has a significant influence on the outcome and in the other it has no effect at all.