The market has been heavily engineered and gamed to be positive sum. But sometimes I wonder could it turn out to be negative sum on certain timescales. That is that overall money would be lost on markets.
It can certainly be negative sum for a generation at a time, say 20 years. The US stock market has the good fortune of not doing that in a long time but if you look around the world for example Japan these periods are not hard to find.
