[sportsbettinge]

Again, with all due respect, I think you're over simplifying it. If you invest in shares of a company, you are in one sense betting on the competence of that company's internal management. Yes, bad management decisions will bring down stock prices and shareholders will complain and file lawsuits which the company will defend with limited liability and an army of lawyers. However, when management make good decisions, the shareholders are merely happy with THEMSELVES for "picking the right stocks", and the managers live to get sued another day.

And again, criminal negligence is not covered by limited liability anywhere in the world that I'm aware of. That means that if management simply make bad decisions then they are covered, but if they make criminal decisions, they are just as liable as anyone else, often more so. You'd also be surprised as to what can constitute criminal negligence in some countries.



A couple years ago, I owned a company that built software for casinos. One of my main reasons for selling the business was the first hand insight it gave me into how such companies manipulate things as basic as revenue and cashflow in order to deceive regulators and investors, and how standard such malpractice seems to be.

Share prices rarely have anything to do with the actual monetary value of a company, and they are heavily manipulated to benefit a few at the cost of many.

Stock markets are a lot like a casino, except instead of fixed rules and well known house odds that anyone can work out with a calculator, the rules are continuously made up and modified by the house, and the odds are given to some, while deliberately hidden from others.

I also have a basic issue with the idea of businesses or even currencies that have purely speculative value that isn't based on legitimate revenues or physical backing (ie, fiat economies). It just legitimises the notion that the whole thing is made up to begin with.

Who determines how much a company is worth? It will vary from analyst to analyst. If people speculate, thats entirely upto them, you cannot stop a man from paying £10 for something you would only value at £4. All you can do I guess is implement tougher conditions.

Stock markets are like Casino's in this day and age where the big institutions virtually rig the market through various contacts, a whole network built-up from long ago. They use Algo-trading programmes (high-frequency trading programmes) where, just like counting cards at a Casino, they can virtually tip the market one way or another based on their trading executions and what will make them the most money.

But the single biggest probelm is the use of leverage, whi8ch totally distorts normal market trading patterns with liquidity that simply does not exist in reality. For example, I have £1000 to invest, but the bank allows me to leverage that ten times. So any trading I do is worth ten times as much or any losses are ten times as big. .....Where did the bank get the extra money from to lend to me? It did not, it simply created it out of thin air and present it as a figure on your screen (fractional reserve banking).

Having said all of that, you can be a shareholder without ever having traded on the stock market at all. Many folk forget the stock market is merely a big shop window where companies looking to expand or attain a valuation, come and raise funds by selling equity in their common stock to ordinary folk. There are thousands of companies and corporations that are not on the stock market but are just as successful remaining private. Stocks markets are high-risk in general and should be avoided in this day and age simply because of the corruption that is rife within them and the huge instability everytime there is any crisis.

There are alternatives, direct business partnerships. Business syndicates - people who work together for the same common goals. Private equity investment - as much as some maybe against this, it can be a good partnership if the right kind of people can be found.

Allahu A'lam