“They are nothing more than a casino wheel.”
In gambling you roll the dice and you can lose it all. If you dollar cost averaged into the S&P 500 stock fund over the last 30 years you got about an average 9%+ annual return.
The key is to NOT try and time the market, save enough money, invest it and LEAVE IT ALONE. If you save and invest 10-20% or more of your paycheck and invest it in the overall stock market over decades you will be able to retire at a reasonable age and live comfortably. The problem is - many people will come up with all sorts of excuses why they won’t save the money in the first place.
But even if you do invest and try to time the market and do everything wrong you will likely not lose all of your money like gambling. Investing is nothing like gambling. You have to be pretty stupid to lose ALL of your money in the stock market. The only time that happens is when some fool puts it all into a single stock that goes belly-up.
The ones suffering the most are the retirees, and they aren’t earning a salary to dollar cost average into this market. Most had an AA set, and a good number of them were geared towards conservative investing. The crippling of the bond funds, along with low interest rates on MMs & CDs, is destroying seniors.
Oh, and just wait until the retirees have to take their RMDs by the end of the year. RMD valuations were based on the end of 2021, and those assets being sold to fulfill their RMD requirement are a great deal lower now than they were at the end of 2021.