Stock Picking, Capitalism and Communism

Rather frequently, some writer/article/person calls stock picking gambling. Connotatively, gambling like in a casino, where you inevitably lose.

This is wrong, and, furthermore, must be wrong for capitalism to work.

Namely- what is an entrepreneur?

There's only so many ways to make money. Most entrepreneurs aren't coming up with any particularly new ideas. They're just people opening another pizza place, building a gas station, or some similar concept.

And, of course, the stock market is filled with unproven ideas. It's just as possible to invest in someone else's new idea as your own.

More to the point, there are enough stocks that, whatever great idea you have, you can normally find overlap and invest in someone else already executing it.

Human labor isn't that valuable. The economy is mostly built around capital flows.

As such, there is no distinguishable difference between investor and founder. What an idea needs before execution or expansion, is trust. Money. The rich are rich, not because they have thick arms and sharp eyes, but because of return on investment.

It is, at this point, not logically impossible to create a world wherein any investment is as good as any other. However, doing so makes an utter mockery of human intelligence or diversity. In turn, a simple government organization, stripped of distracting emotions and controlled by a widespread group invulnerable to the weaknesses of the individual, would invest better than any competition.

If the world were like people accuse it of, it would imply that we should switch to communism. It's absurd to assign wealth based on some sort of accident of history. If everything were distributed based on ancient coin flips, and the wealthy had no merit to their property, and the rich were instead just living it up using return on investment without sentient control of their property, that system could not be reasonably condoned.

A system of morality should work equally regardless of dimensionality. If an almighty being created the universe in this exact shape two seconds ago, or if it came to this over millions of years, their should be no moral difference.

If wealth was distributed by ancient coin flips, there would be no moral difference if all the money were collected and redistributed by coin flip. Going from State A to equivalent State B should not have moral implications. Since A is a random distribution and B is a random distribution, the two are not distinguishable. As such, anything that applies in B should apply in A.

Reality isn't like these people say it is. No mathematical model, no hedge system, no broad index, is capable of modeling the market with the speed and accuracy provided by the full power of human sentience. And of course, people are different. Some can beat the market, some can't.

But, at the end of the day, someone has to beat the market. Without this genius investor, the market's movements would all descend into noise. In the end, everyone who doesn't beat the market, is just entrusting their money to the people who think they can beat the market, and mirroring their moves. In other words, no matter how many weird investing programs you unleash on the market, they are incapable of coming to their own judgments. Computers simply lack that degree of intelligence (as do other forms of automated thought, like hedge funds and ETFs). Instead, they copy, and therefore magnify the sounds of a few market movers. AKA, stock pickers.