There is a very deep misunderstanding of the purpose of stock trading. Somehow almost everybody assumes that the very purpose of stock investment is to time the

There is a very deep misunderstanding of the purpose of stock trading. Somehow almost everybody assumes that the very purpose of stock investment is to time the market. But no, timing the market is only a mechanism of the market. Those who successfully time the market are more a part of the market mechanism rather than the customers/end users of the market. The only real purpose of financial markets is risk management. Any human society (and non-human societies also) has to risk some capital to gain more capital/value. The purpose of stocks and financial markets in general is to diversify the risk, while still funding oportunities and it's the only proven mechanism by which a large portion of the population can participate in this wealth creation. The value of risk management is hard to fathom. But if you are a programmer, you might want to try and simulate "gambler's ruin" and see what happens with high risk or low risk strategies. In this simple game, computing the right risk management is the difference between stagnation and exponential growth. In a complex economy, this seems also to be true.