Why assume I do not know about the subject, simply because I do not view shareholding in a favourable light. It's because I know about such things is precisely why I dislike how companies can be crippled by having to please shareholders.
Also my mum lost £20k+ in a share collapse a while back, couldn't be very sympathetic I'm afraid. Just as she wouldn't be if someone lost money gambling. Oh wait it was gambling, except people do not like to call it for what it is. A finance writer for one of the broadsheets every year had his young son throw darts at the top 100 FTSE index and compare how well those darts did Vs various experts. His son's random choices did better every time I saw him write about this.
It is not the only way to finance things or to make a pension. Or even a particularly wise way to sort a pension out, just ask all those who lost their pensions in share collapses.
Yet idiots who lose money when shares go down complain and whinge. Well of course they do, that's how shares operate sometime up, sometimes down. No different from complaining that your horse didn't win at the derby.
You are confusing several things: the private person and the institutional player.
The private investor is usually in it for the long term, with stocks such as M&S, one or other of the banks (until 2007/8!) and some holding companies spreading their portfolio over many companies, industries and countries. In stable times, as from the 60s until perhaps the end of the 90s, this was a perfectly safe way for an individual to keep capital and make some modest interest. Yes, modest. The big money was made on margin (not interest earned), with instant access to brokers and all the services that the ordinary small investor didn't have, the closest access being having the bank sell on your behalf. Brokers had little time for small investors - not hard to understand why.
And what to do when your investment takes a slow dive? Sell? Capital gains and brokerage fees soon make you lose one helluva lot; often safer to hang on in there and pray the tide turns again. Sometimes not. But how do you, the little guy, ever know? Next week can be far too late.
So yes, in troubled times, better out of it, just as amolitor and the proverb say.
But regarding the gamble aspect: there's also the concept that money left lying in a bank is a stinking fish. Today, as you must know, there's only insult in place of bank interest, and you actually lose value on savings as time marches onwards.
