(b) know the stock market is little more than gambling.
The stock market isn't gambling. Certain high-risk investment strategies are similar to gambling, but medium-high risk strategies have a risk profile that's similar to investing in land or property, while medium risk strategies like using an index tracker (which I do) are very safe on a timescale of a decade or more, since your investment won't be wiped out by anything short of the apocalypse due to it's coverage of 100, 250 or 500+ companies and will rebound from crashes, recessions and bankruptcies given a little time and a hands-off approach.
The risk in investing in land or property is as much gambling as investing in the stocks, you should see what is happening to all those buy to let people who have bought those apartments which seem to be springing up left right and centre. Yes the stock market can be educated gambling, but you are still placing a bet. In the same way a good poker player can increase the chance that they will win, but they can't guarantee it.
Gambling implies a net negative return when summed over a large number of attempts.
If you are not an expert, or following very good advice then it fits the gambling definition you gave.
Successfully investing in the stock market doesn't require a great deal of expertise. Take a look at some historical charts for the various markets; they have a general upwards trend with fluctuations around that trend. If you invest in a tracker for that market, your gains or losses will follow that trend; you don't need to do any 'expert' stuff, unless you consider buying a tracker as 'expert'.
While investing in property or investing in stocks carries risk, the return on the average investment is positive, and the degree to which it is positive or negative and the probability of a single investment being positive varies depending on the investment strategy. An investment in a single house or a single company can evaporate if that house or company falls foul of any of a range of catastrophes, but a diverse portfolio is resistant to single points of failure and as the diversification increases, the probability of it providing a positive return at the end of a given time period also increases, with a corresponding decrease in the probable magnitude of any positive or negative return. With enough diversification, investments in the stock market match government bonds (vulnerable to government or currency collapse, Armageddon), bullion kept at home (theft, Armageddon), cash at home (theft, inflation, Armageddon) and cash in the bank (bank bankruptcy, Armageddon) for security while providing a much better average return.
Except around say now, where you should take a look at how much most endowments have fallen by. Unless you know what you are doing (and factor in the time and resource involved in planning out a diverse array of investments) then you are gambling. More to the point, putting your money in a bank (backed by a government or several) is still the safest option.
Trackers are diverse-portfolios-in-a-package, and are the ideal instrument for someone who wants a low-risk, low-hassle, long-term investment vehicle that doesn't require much knowledge on their part. They even outperform most other fund packages, since their fees tend to be very low, which gives them a significant head-start over managed funds; I use the Fidelity MoneyBuilder UK Index fund, which has a fee of 0.1%. All you need to be successful with a tracker is a decade or two and the nerves to not panic and pull out your money when the market takes a dip.
The stock market is not a zero-sum game; the losers don't have to balance out the winners. If you want a market that's akin to gambling, look at the currency exchange market. In that market, every pound of profit is matched by a pound of loss for someone else, minus the spread (so it's really a negative sum game, just like gambling), but in the stock market, people buy a share of a company, which generates profit over time and pays this profit back to the shareholder as a dividend, in much the same way that a bank pays interest on deposits. The situation is a little more complicated, since the ability of the company to pay dividends can vary over time and the value of a share in the company varies with the market's assessment of it's present and future ability to pay dividends, but if you're investing in a tracker that tracks an entire market, it's not necessary to deal with that level of complexity.
