Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Do I make money in the stock market from other people losing money?
There's really not a simple yes/no answer.  It depends on whether you're doing short term trading or long term investing.  In the short term, it's not much different from sports betting (and would be almost an exact match if the bettors also got a percentage of the team's ticket sales), In the long term, though, your profit mostly comes from the growth of the company.  As a company - Apple, say, or Tesla - increases sales of iPhones or electric cars, it either pays out some of the income as dividends, or invests them in growing the company, so it becomes more valuable.  If you bought shares cheaply way back when, you profit from this increase when you sell them.  The person buying it doesn't lose, as s/he buys at today's market value in anticipation of continued growth.  Of course there's a risk that the value will go down in the future instead of up. Of course, there are also psychological factors, say when people buy Apple or Tesla because they're popular, instead of at a rational valuation.  Or when people start panic-selling, as in the '08 crash.  So then their loss is your gain - assuming you didn't panic, of course :-)