Having stocks is definitely better now than when I was younger. Fun story: I was interested in investing as a kid, family member opened an account for me as a

Having stocks is definitely better now than when I was younger. Fun story: I was interested in investing as a kid, family member opened an account for me as a minor, with enough money to pick one investment to buy and hold. It had a bad month, account went below some threshold minimum balance I didn't know about (I'm sure it said somewhere, I didn't get to choose who the account was through), and suddenly account provider started liquidating shares every month for an account fee because of a balance below some amount, and we ended up having to close the account at a loss to avoid fees eventually wiping it out. Obviously a lot of lessons packed in there, but at the time it seemed obvious that the whole system was designed to prevent regular folks who couldn't just start with many $k accounts from buying and holding. Now there are tons of low cost options for things like robo-investors, ETFs and index funds, monthly low value investing, etc. It's a whole different world, which on one hand is nice, but on the other leaves me with the feeling that "regular" investments are some kind of loss-leader or tool to enable some other means of profiting the big players.