There are guys who make lots of money with short term trading.
It’s like poker. It’s a game of skill, and there are highly skilled players, and they do win everyone else’s money.
Investing? That it is not.
--and that's how gamblers, whores, and thieves view the markets when they want a quick kill. The way grown-ups see the market place is as a place where we create wealth to feed our families. If good people work hard, their hard work does not take other people's hard work away from them. In fact, a good place to get a lot of work done is where ever we see other people working hard. I've found that a bad place to get work done is where I find gamblers, whores, and thieves thinking that the wealth I created is somehow theirs.
Merchants create wealth when they provide the service of buying things at a low price and selling them later at a higher price. It's a necessary service that we all need and skilled merchants are richly rewarded for the wealth they create. This is true for the sale of used cars, of canned food, and it's also true for markets for shares of corporations. Something else that we need to understand is that unskilled merchants harm others when they foolishly buy junk at high prices and then go broke when they're forced to unload their wares below cost. They hurt others not only when they distort market prices but also when they either go on the dole, when they complain on forums like these about gamblers winning "everyone else's money", or when they attempt to illegally "take back" the wealth of others.