Add this to the reasons for why I struggle to take the stock market seriously. Can you make money off trading stocks? Absolutely. Can you successfully use th

Add this to the reasons for why I struggle to take the stock market seriously. Can you make money off trading stocks? Absolutely. Can you successfully use the stock market as part of your retirement plan? Probably. However, I don't "believe" in it. In no way is it operating on any intuitive sense of what would make a stock worth more than another. Today it seems entirely driven by keywords, inverted logic, and the intent to short. I don't see how artificially pumping up the market with institutionalized retirement plans helps either, besides to keep money out of the hands of the middle class and in those who can manipulate it. What's worse is stocks are becoming one of the few ways that said middle class can even get ahead; bonds have a very low yield and could even implode if the US dollar declines, inflation eats at savings, and wages struggle to keep up with said inflation. Articles like this one are going to appear in (the equivalent of) textbooks in the future and people will look at it and wonder how we could not see what's coming for us. On the bright side, I hope this is the beginning of the end for the flurry of bullshit on the internet. Not that there won't be plenty of bullshit to go around, as was the case pre-internet, but the combination of SEO and AI may turn into an ouroboros that consumes itself. Though I think the ouroboros is supposed to represent the cycle of life, so maybe an "ant mill" is more analogous.