investing is no better than gambling at a casino. It’s all about luck.

That's simply not true. We're in a country and an economy that's structurally favorable to equity investment. Trading costs are artificially low. Returns are all goosed by federal and state policies. The USD being the global reserve currency guarantees inflows of cash pretty much indefinitely. Big Number Always Goes Up over time. Go back even two or three years, and there's really no point in which putting money into a basic EFT didn't beat the rate of inflation handily. Nevermind the yield garnered by real estate investment, pretty much everywhere since forever.

The deck is definitely stacked, but getting a slice of the pie isn't difficult. That's what makes all this so seductive. The only thing keeping you from being richer is that you didn't start out richer to begin with.

There is no model in the world that can sufficiently take into account all the complex variables and the non-linear processes that drive the market.

You don't need a model to recognize that (population growth + consolidating wealth + Fed Money Printer Go :brrrrrrrrrrrr: ) = inflated asset prices.

This isn't wizardry, its rent-seeking plain and simple. Buy capital at X and set rents at Y. You'll get X back in Y * Z years, and the rest is pure passive income.

people who got rich in the process thought they were really smart for seeing the needles moving when in reality it was because they got lucky.

This wasn't luck. It was very deliberate engineered public policy. The neoliberal economic model that's been in effect since at least Truman guarantees positive ROI for investors over the long term. Domestic business growth strategy combined with foreign resource exploitation juices the equity markets. And so long as the juice continues to flow, asset returns will continue to grow.