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Those are wrong assertions, the wrong questions.
Of couse it's very different from gambling. Gambling is where you guess which horse is going to run fastest.
You wouldn't call a shopkeeper who orders strange stock for Christmas, a gambler..
The stock market is like a load of parallel escalators all going generally up and at different speeds, in a jittery/lurching way. You choose which one to get on and if you see another going better you move to that. You can always choose to use the one which hardly moves but does it very predictably. Like the tropes say, participate don't anticipate, use the trend.
The simplistic words you use create an illusion. Yes if you were the most self-destructive person you could lose the lot.
It's all about probablilities, so you limit your exposure for when the next covid or bank crisis or war happens - you manage the risk. Covid actualy arrived quite slowly. The reaction to that could be to ask how long before everything gets back to normal, and what's the best way to gain extra from the recovery. When the world financial system collapses, we'll be in all sorts of middens. Nobody will be buying houses either.
Any investments you have, like pensions, are equally weighted across the stock & bond market. Including bitcoin now.
I keep a fixed amount of money in the trading fund and remove profits so I'm back to the same amount in there. It was never more than 2% of my worldly wealth and it has never dropped by more than 25%. I leverage it quite highly. Some days it has gone down by 10 or 20% but that's along with the days where it goes up 50 or 500%. Yes, in a day. So at worst you stop, you limit the falling stuff, and wait until it hits the bottom and decide whether to reinvest. No single stock should be able to make a worrying difference. You didn't have too many Centrica shares did you?
When I started it dropped to about 20% of 2% of my balance sheet total, ie 0.4%. Now the trading fund is far less than 2%.
Very important is to decide your timescales, your amout of work, your reasonably expected risks and gains. I put a lot of time in, and use knowledge to keep the risks down, and be realistic.
A backstop - Ultimately the platform stops you losing all the money you put in, by law, so in fact you can take a very high risk with it. I've never been near the platform warnings.
Definitely, most people lose some, at some point. Most lose it forever. Say that's 90%. So look at what's going on - find out how the brokers profit, how people do unwise things, etc etc.
Decide whether it's a "flutter" - like going to horse races. You do it to play, not in the expectation of a profit.
If you bought antiques at one auction and put them back in, the chance of gaining would be small, though it's there.
Dealers do it all the time. They do it in a way that works.
It's a bit like DIY. You can bring the walls down or blow the place up, like "most people" would if they didn't know enough about what they were doing. If you can't keep yourself to the ones who do good stuff, employ someone else.
That "most people lose money swing trading", is misleading. "Most people" are thick as **** and twice as stupid.
Look again at that FTSE graph. Read that quote above again -
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