> you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market.

I can't tell if you are promoting the stock market as a better or worse alternative to gambling?

If you meant the latter, you couldn't be further from the truth. The stock market, as a whole, represents the combined productivity of all the publicly traded firms in the country. Day to day, the stock market is unpredictably volatile. But over the long term (decades), it trends upward and by a large amount. There is no safer investment with the same kinds of returns and there is lots of research to prove it.

But short-term speculation and individual stock picking is much more akin to gambling.