Stock markets attract new investors by displaying "unrealized gains". So stock markets are Ponzi schemes.
the market : one of the efficientest way to allocate money to those who are right ! and sadly for the people who are wrong ! sader they can be wrong all their life... so better to keep them away from money... they could do such damage !
I'm surprised no one in the thread has mentioned survivorship bias and how we ignore it in broad indexes to make those pretty long term charts that always seem to go up up up.
So, except for a few, the majority believes that the stock markets are not Ponzi Schemes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!