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And some people who can't really afford to buy Powerball tickets every week. And a few of them hit it big. Doesn't make it a rational choice from a purely economic perspective.

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The biggest flaw of conventional economic theory is that "people are rational".

Do you see all trading on the stock market as speculative and basically gambling?

Seeing it that way makes budgeting for it a lot easier (for me): I fully expect the loss of any and all money I'd bring into a casino, treating it as an admittance fee paid in exchange for the thrill of the tiny possibility of winning big, whose occurrence would probably influence me to double down and inevitably lose everything.

I hope thinking this way about retail investing reduces the risk of YOLOing one's life savings on individual stocks.

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