Abtractly, there is no conceptual difference. Everything is a gamble. We are always betting on everything. We are always positioning ourselves in relation to everything else in the world. Often unconsciously and unknowingly.
It becomes problematic when we make a game of it and add financial stakes. Gambling is a lot like drugs in its ability to hijack the brain's reward circuits. I stopped investing in cryptocurrencies because seeing +400% profits was like crack. I never gambled any money I couldn't afford to lose but there are people out there who were leveraging their entire lives to FOMO into markets.
When I own a stock I also vote on the board of directors and so I have long term influence on the future. (I don't agree with stocks where I don't get that vote, or where my vote is meaningless because insiders have more control than their ownership share - even though they exist. Yes I know the amount of stock I own is trivial, but I still at least have it)
They do both involve taking risks for money admittedly but there are crucial differences.
You actually participate meaningfully in the outcome via investing instead of just price discovery and the successes are derived from the valuation or income of the venture instead of the losers. The participation is not only in impact on their credit rating and sales but also concrete choices in government of it.
Not to mention in principle there is an actual activity being backed by the investment to produce non-zero sum gains. While there may be risks involved in say, running a turnip farm or sending a ship across the ocean, you are still supporting a useful activity for its own end. Crucially as well there is motivation to do the task even without the market, even though it may enable it.
If you can manipulate the outcome of the turnip farm (as opposed to the market) to make it succeed that is doing useful work and not just cheating a bet. A guideline of the distinction would be - would charging somebody for making the outcome successful in a not otherwise criminal way be a Kafkaesque injustice?
You can in fact use the market to gamble via options intended for credit or insurance but stopping those by stopping the market entirely would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I've never understood this comparison. To me it's simple: Investments actually produce net gain in the economy. Some people use the NYSE _like_ gambling, but the key difference is value is created.
Investing takes x capital, put it into a machine, and x + (yield * x) comes out. In gambling, x is put in, x always comes out, but on the way out x is simply distributed among a different population.
Investing literally creates net value (or loss, technically) that didn't exist before. Gambling cannot do either: x is always constant, however x is divided up differently.
All stocks are incentivized to go a specific direction.
You could consider Options more like gambling, but for that reason they are restricted to specific people. We also have things to prevent bad incentives, like insider trading laws, which prediction markets don't have.
I don't think there is a difference today. Stocks used to be about long-term value but now the same gambling-esque mentality has applied to stocks as well, see things like GME. The modern stock market is basically a prediction market for attention/virality, in the same way that cryptocoins are.
It becomes problematic when we make a game of it and add financial stakes. Gambling is a lot like drugs in its ability to hijack the brain's reward circuits. I stopped investing in cryptocurrencies because seeing +400% profits was like crack. I never gambled any money I couldn't afford to lose but there are people out there who were leveraging their entire lives to FOMO into markets.