You may be able to make money buying stocks in the long run.


You may also be able to make money going to work each day, or starting a lemonade stand.


But to say stocks offer an easier score than anything else an individual might do with his time or his money is misleading.


In fact, given that the stock market should be fairly priced by people who have absolutely no skills, no time, and no alternative uses for their money competing to buy it - their opporunity cost is zero - chances are if you can apply an ounce of labor to your capital, or make any kind of "choice" about where to invest, you can do better than the stock market.


But that's all a simplification.


I just didn't want to be accused of saying either that wealth/entropy doesn't exist in the human experience, or that it exists everywhere but in the stock market.


The point is, the stock market is no money machine.


Also, I am not aware that duration swaps - whereby you turn purchasing power or claims on human labor in one time frame into currency in another time frame - are inherently costless or profitable. Beyond the point of diminishing marginal returns, and given a duration-extension capacity which is fixed in the short term, investment might actually be a costly process, wherein you are competing against people who are willing to spend two apples today to get one apple 10 years from now.


eLROY