A dividend just reduces the value of the company by x cents per share and pays you x cents per share in cash. It's not "free income" as most people seem to think. It makes more sense to think of it like a buyback.

You are speculating in a company even it pays dividends. There is no guarantee dividends will continue. Are you trying to say there is a difference between a speculator and an investor? If so please explain.

If the company pays dividends, you may purchase a stock with zero expectation that the price of that stock will rise. There may be risk, but some of that risk is that your asset will stop delivering value to you, not soley that other speculators will not be willing to buy that asset from you at a higher price.

You are confusing speculation with growth investment. They are not the same.

Ah, you're right. I had my English vocabulary loaded instead of my investor vocabulary.

Speculators have shorter windows than retail investors looking to store value for long-terms gains. Owning a non-dividend stock in my retirement fund is not equivalent to speculation.

Why does the time frame make a difference?

Because what the market will do between now and next week is pure speculation. Over the next 30 years you can expect value to grow about 7% per year on average.

edit: s/the market/value/

I'm not sure that continuous growth can be reliably predicted over a 30 year span. There is reason to believe that we may need to move away from economic systems dependent on continuous growth. (edit: though I highly suspect this is more than 30 years away.)

Buying a range of stocks and holding them for the long term may reduce your risks, but that doesn't mean it isn't speculation.

Speculation just means that you are buying something with the expectation that you will sell it for a higher value. When your assets don't produce direct value (such as dividends, rental income, functional utility, etc) then investment in those assets is speculation, regardless of the risk level or time frame.

Just because the US stock market has worked out in the past century doesn't mean it will continue to reap those types of gains. I you would have invested in the Nikkei 30 years ago, you would still be waiting.

The very act of investing is the act of taking on risk. It's not free money, you are being rewarded for taking on the risk.

Every disclaimer you will see in the trading world has the disclaimer "Past performance is not an indication of future performance".

Everything in trading is probabilities, which is a way of thinking humans mightily struggle with.

A good day to day example is when a weather forecast calls for an 80% chance for rain on the weekend, so you cancel your camping trip. It ends up not raining, and you curse the meteorologist for being wrong.

They were not wrong - yet most people say they were, showing they are unable to think in a probabilistic way.