I was tempted to chime in with a similar thoughts.

Except for ease and lower commissions, being a shareholder is not that different from buying a house. Whether you laid out the money to have the house built or are the tenth owner of the house, it's still your investment and your house. The fact that the first guy built it for $20K and you paid $350K some 25 years later doesn't change your relationship with the house. Being the one that built the house or bought shares in an IPO (Inital Public Offering), in the long run, is just a conversation point.

Some people buy houses to "fix-up" and re-sell. Some people buy old clunkers and restore them to sell as classic cars. Some people buy baseball cards. If the idea is to, one day, sell these for a profit, they are investors and have put their money at risk.

Now evaluating the worth of a share is something that is done continuously by many people and is subject a lot of variables and occasionally idiotic thinking. Some stockholders have no idea of what the company they are buying does. And yes, the stock market could look like a casino. Nevertheless, these folks are investors.