timmopussycat
Puritan Board Junior
Anyone here own stock, pretty much an educated gamble, people here angry at mutual fund investments or trading?
The difference here is that one can investigate the company that issues the stock and find out how it assesses its market, how its competitors assess their market and how the target company plans to set and meet its goals.
In the same way one can compare the investment philosophies of mutual funds. Gaining knowledge of these things may enable someone to have better "odds" of sucess in the stock market (in a chance ruled universe that doesn't exist) than someone playing a game of calculating "odds" on the fly such as poker, but you won't prove it by me. A skilled poker player knowing the odds might invest some money to make more money for his or her retirement plan and do well at it while somebody who buys into the mutual fund du jour at the wrong time for the wrong reasons might lose his shirt. The moral problem that our hypothetically successful Christian poker player would have is that he is not giving eqivalent value for the money he is receiving and that would burden the conscience.
On the other hand all investment helps keep a business afloat for at least the short run and the failed Christian investor can take some solace from the fact that his or her dollars have helped keep the wolf from a few doors for a while at least. I don't know whether investment losses are deductible from income for tax purposes down there below 49, or across the pond. If they are not, they should be.