Yeah, I think we’re aligned :)

Oh, I agree, but you were the one talking about people losing their volatile investments and how you felt sad that your company’s stock had gone down. You weren’t talking about the act of exchanging shares, so I feel you’re moving the goalposts here…

it’s important to remember the zero-sum aspects of the game. The money isn’t destroyed, it just changes hands - usually to people who are less free with risky investment of it.

Just nitpicking to point out that this is very much not true when it comes to stock markets and the like. If a company is worth $100B and drops to $50B in the course of a week, no one else became $50B richer from that stock, not even collectively. Publicly traded companies usually don’t even have 100% of their stock at the exchange. It could very well be that only 5% of stock was traded throughout that week, meaning somewhere between $2.5B and $5B changed hands (assuming each share was only traded once). Yet $50B is gone from the market because there’s no one left willing to pay more than the valuation. That’s why the market is called volatile: it’s not based on concrete value but purely a measurement of what people are willing to pay for it based on sentiment that might change at any moment.