Buying stock should not be gambling but business.

The market crashed again today. It has been heading generally down for months. Late last summer a fellow I admire asked my advice when it comes to investing. I put him off. At the time, I had a bad feeling when it came to the market and I feared he would lose money in the short term. I was right. Late summer was a poor time to enter the market.

About a month ago, I learned some of my relatives are considering putting some money in the market. I tried to encourage them to learn a bit more before putting too much money into stocks, mutual funds and ETFs. Again, I wasn't convinced that it was a good time to start investing. (Novice investors don't accept losses well.)

Why didn't I just tell all these folk not to invest as a correction was coming? Because I  didn't know. I don't have a crystal ball. Plus, my advice would have been contrary to one of the axioms of investing: Never try to time the market.

At least, never try to time the market as if it were a game and one is placing bets. Think of the market as place selling small slivers of ownership in numerous businesses. These slivers are stocks. If you have some money you don't need at the moment, some money that can be tied up for a number of months, possibly even years, and there is a business in which you'd like to have a sliver of ownership, it may be the right time to buy the stock.

The above is a screen grab of my top movers of the day. All moved down. And the banks all lost more than a dollar a share. That's a lot in one day. Think about it. If one owned a mix made up of a thousand bank shares, one lost more than a thousand dollars in just a matter of hours. And that is just today.

This year, the Royal Bank hit a high of $108.52. It closed today at $93.62. That's a loss of $14.90 per share. The TD is down $9.60 from its 2018 high and the Scotia Bank has lost $15.83. It is easy to see someone holding a thousand shares being down more than $12,500 or more from this year's highs.

If you are a gambler, you are upset. You bet on some losers. Nags. But, if you are an investor you own some small slices of three banks. That cannot be all that bad. Banks are good businesses to own. The Scotia Bank has a $3.40 dividend, the Royal yields $3.92 and the TD delivers $2.68 annually. The investor sees his bank stock as a solid source of income -- possibly as much as $3300 or more annually.

And the investor who is in for the long term, believes bank stocks will recover. The investor has confidence in the system. The investor will follow the financial numbers and if the bank ones are good or, even better, show improvement, the investor will buy more stock if possible. They might even buy that extra stock in a fourth bank, spreading the risk.

One never truly knows the future.