>Actual return on investment for any stock or fund is completely non-deterministic, and therfore it is gambling. I could not disagree more. That is not a defin

>Actual return on investment for any stock or fund is completely non-deterministic, and therfore it is gambling. I could not disagree more. That is not a definition of gambling. Does that mean that investing in a large-cap index fund for a period of 40 years is gambling? What about putting your money in the trust of a bank? Even the bank's returns are non-deterministic. The government could collapse. Even keeping money in your house under the mattress includes risk (what if your house catches fire?). What method of saving or investing wealth would you say is deterministic? A better measure of whether or not something is gambling is how much risk is associated with it. If I bought a US government bond, nobody would call that a gamble, because it's very unlikely that the the government will collapse. Similarly, if I bought a mutual fund comprised of a mixture of large, stable companies and various bonds, it is unlikely that it will go down in value over the long term. "Over the long term" is the key here. If the US economy has an overall downward trend for the next 40 years, then think about what that would mean. That government bond isn't looking too great, either, in that circumstance.