Advantages of Stock Investing over creating new business

Let me start off by defining what I mean by stock investing. When I say stock investing, I don't mean buying and selling a company base on the price movement alone. I don't mean technical analysis or insider trading or investing base on the potential outlook of a certain stock. When I say stock investing, i simply mean value investing or buying bargains as started in the last century by guys like Ben Graham, John Templeton, Phil Carrett, Phil Fisher and made famous by Warren Buffett.

Now that it's clear, lets get on to the reason why I think stock investing has certain advantages for a human in this time or generation than creating new businesses.

1.) There are more stocks that you can pick than starting a business. For every business that you can think of, there's no exaggeration to say that you can probably find 1000 times as many public listed companies to select from.

2.) The one business that you come up with has no track record and only projections whereas the historical business performance of the 1000 publicly listed companies are present on top of performance projections. Think of buying a concept car vs buying from 1000 existing car models with performance review.

3.) There's a lot of things that you have to do and spend in starting a business - build the management, vendor and customer network. You may not have enough time and capital resources on your own to build on those and there's a lot of things you can do wrong when you are handling all of them yourself. According to WEB, when investing in stocks, there are only two things you can do wrong: 1.) Pick the wrong stock (company) 2.) Buy it at the wrong price.

4.) When starting your own business, you generally need to invest 100% of the capital required to kick off the business. In stock investing, there are few but occasional opportunities (approx every 5 years) for you to invest less than 100% of the capital required to run such wonderful business.