But both of these calculations depend on an (unknown) time period. In other words, you can always say, "in the long run..." but you never know how long. If the period is 50 years, with 49 years of losses and the last year being the whole gain then... you'll be dead by the time you collect your profits. And while I would tend to agree that the overall US equities market (which is what I assume you mean here by "the market") will almost undoubted grow over the long run as the US and world economy grows, again, you don't know the time period, so you cannot invest based on that information alone. You could potentially invest in thousands of individual instruments which will all individually go down, even as the aggregate of all instruments goes up. And you cannot know, a priori, which investments are which. Gambling has the same problem here when you talk about it abstractly: the aggregate of all bets through (say) professional betting sites will always be negative since that's the business they are in, but you cannot know ahead of time about individual bets, which is what you pick. Hence I'm still not seeing a good reason to treat these concepts differently: they all involve a calculated risk, with varied degrees of knowables and unknowables.
But both of these calculations depend on an (unknown) time period. In other words, you can always say, "in the long run..." but you never know how long. If the period is 50 years, with 49 years of losses and the last year being the whole gain then... you'll be dead by the time you collect your profits. And while I would tend to agree that the overall US equities market (which is what I assume you mean here by "the market") will almost undoubted grow over the long run as the US and world economy grows, again, you don't know the time period, so you cannot invest based on that information alone. You could potentially invest in thousands of individual instruments which will all individually go down, even as the aggregate of all instruments goes up. And you cannot know, a priori, which investments are which. Gambling has the same problem here when you talk about it abstractly: the aggregate of all bets through (say) professional betting sites will always be negative since that's the business they are in, but you cannot know ahead of time about individual bets, which is what you pick. Hence I'm still not seeing a good reason to treat these concepts differently: they all involve a calculated risk, with varied degrees of knowables and unknowables.

But both of these calculations depend on an (unknown) time period. In other words, you can always say, "in the long run..." but you never know how long. If the period is 50 years, with 49 years of losses and the last year being the whole gain then... you'll be dead by the time you collect your profits. And while I would tend to agree that the overall US equities market (which is what I assume you mean here by "the market") will almost undoubted grow over the long run as the US and world economy grows, again, you don't know the time period, so you cannot invest based on that information alone. You could potentially invest in thousands of individual instruments which will all individually go down, even as the aggregate of all instruments goes up. And you cannot know, a priori, which investments are which. Gambling has the same problem here when you talk about it abstractly: the aggregate of all bets through (say) professional betting sites will always be negative since that's the business they are in, but you cannot know ahead of time about individual bets, which is what you pick. Hence I'm still not seeing a good reason to treat these concepts differently: they all involve a calculated risk, with varied degrees of knowables and unknowables.

But both of these calculations depend on an (unknown) time period. In other words, you can always say, "in the long run..." but you never know how long. If the period is 50 years, with 49 years of losses and the last year being the whole gain then... you'll be dead by the time you collect your profits. And while I would tend to agree that the overall US equities market (which is what I assume you mean here by "the market") will almost undoubted grow over the long run as the US and world economy grows, again, you don't know the time period, so you cannot invest based on that information alone. You could potentially invest in thousands of individual instruments which will all individually go down, even as the aggregate of all instruments goes up. And you cannot know, a priori, which investments are which. Gambling has the same problem here when you talk about it abstractly: the aggregate of all bets through (say) professional betting sites will always be negative since that's the business they are in, but you cannot know ahead of time about individual bets, which is what you pick. Hence I'm still not seeing a good reason to treat these concepts differently: they all involve a calculated risk, with varied degrees of knowables and unknowables.