With the wild moves of GameStop GME stocks,
and AMC Entertainment AMC,
or last week at cannabis makers, it doesn’t make sense for some to think of the stock market as a casino, a description recently used by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat.
In an interview with Axios that aired on HBO, Stacey Cunningham, president of the New York Stock Exchange, a unit of the ICE Intercontinental Exchange,
he said he rejected that comparison.
“Markets are not a casino. They are highly regulated and highly supervised … We have a market that offers opportunities for investors to enter, invest in the companies they believe in, believe they will grow and then share this wealth creation. ”- NYSE President Stacey Cunningham
It should be noted that casinos are also highly regulated and supervised, although, unlike the stock market, there are no long-term positions that can be incorporated, for example, into a game of blackjack.
Academic research suggests that stock market trading and more traditional gambling have a lot in common. An article published in January says there are 3.5 times more games of chance in stock markets than in more traditional venues such as casinos and lotteries.
The document – from Alok Kumar of the University of Miami, Houng Nguyen of Danang University and Talis Putnins of Sydney University of Technology and the Stockholm School of Economics – says the US and Hong Kong have the highest per capita levels call the stock market game in the world. They identify so-called lottery shares by looking at the volume divided by market capitalization and looking for unusually large ratios.
This is not to say that all stock market investing is gambling. Researchers say about 15% of U.S. stock market volume is associated with gambling, a percentage that reaches up to 30% on the stock exchanges of China and Thailand.