system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do people make money trading stocks?

How people decide where and when to buy or sell? Where the money they make comes from? Is it gambling? Why not?
gpt
Owning a stock is owning part of a company, if you stripped all the complicated parts out it's like a local store saying "hey, you can buy 1% of the store to give us that money now, and in exchange we will give you 1% of the profit every year, and we will let you vote on what we do, but your vote only will count 1%"  so if you think that 1% profit will be worth 100 dollars you would love to buy that for 99 dollars and love it even more to buy it for 50 dollars.  If you bought it for 50 dollars someone else might want to buy it for 99 dollars and you'd like that too because it's a sure thing for you.  If the store poops in all it's food and the news does a story about that then you know the profit is going to be way down and you want to sell sell sell before too many people find out and no one wants to buy your thing. Likewise if you think they are gonna sell the hot new product you'd want to buy as much as possible before the price goes up too much.

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In real life it's gotten very complicated beyond that, and some stocks don't even give dividends anymore and exist just to trade or sell. but the general concept is "I own a small part of this business and get a small part of their profit" 

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