The stock market may be soaring, but the Oracle of Omaha is not impressed. In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Warren Buffett lamented what he described as a lack of opportunities for investors looking for value in the stock market today.
The former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway criticized the rise of speculative trading such as recreational betting over fundamental investing. “It’s hard to find standards when everyone chooses to gamble,” he said.
It’s not the first time Buffett has criticized the growing derivatives market that has diverged from Wall Street’s traditional ways of building wealth. At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in May, he called the stock market “a week with a casino attached” in an interview with CNBC during the meeting.
“We’ve never had people in the mood to gamble more than now. But that doesn’t mean investing is bad. It just means that the prices of a lot of things are going to look stupid,” he said.
While there have always been uneducated stock pickers, the number of retail investors increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been clocking record highs ever since. The disruption of road closures that cut large numbers of people off from their jobs and routines prompted millions to go online and discover the world of financial markets.
The pandemic-era meme stock craze sent stocks like GameStop into wild swings, while the recent hype surrounding aerospace stocks like SpaceX has drawn an even wider audience.
An analysis by JPMorgan Chase found that the number of retail investors immersed in the market jumped by 50 percent from 2023 to 2025. In addition, a growing share of these new participants are adults: In 2024, 37% of 25-year-olds used investment accounts, up from just 6% ten years earlier.
Prediction markets run a growing number of trades that remain disconnected from the underlying markets. These platforms are derivatives markets that are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC. But instead of buying coffee or copper options, as commodity traders have for many years, users of applications such as Kalshi or Polymarket trading contracts are tied to the “yes or no” results of future events in sports, geopolitics, finance and more.
While loose regulation of betting markets has raised concerns about insider trading and youth gambling, adoption continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
‘That’s not investing,’ according to Warren Buffett
In his May interview with CNBC, Buffett rightly pointed out that most users of prediction markets are not “investors” in any conventional sense. “No one can explain why they buy a one-day option,” he said. “When you buy one-day options, or sell them… that’s not investing, it’s not speculating, it’s gambling.”
Although both Wall Street traders and market speculators are ultimately trying to make money, the latter usually have no strategy beyond a desire to get rich quick.
But lack of strategy does not stop them from spending money. The volume of trading in the markets predicting Kalshi and Polymarket has increased significantly in recent months, ballooning from less than 5 billion dollars in September 2025 to almost $ 24 billion in April, which is almost a five-fold increase, according to the analysis of the Pew Research Center.
This year’s FIFA World Cup was a huge success, with US fans expected to bet $2.5 billion on betting markets during the tournament.
Trading turnover in stocks and ETFs, which reflects both buying and selling, is near a record high, according to VandaTrack. The financial data and analytics platform looked at trading activity going back to 2012 and found that profitability was at 99.7 percent.
In other words, speculative investors are turning over assets at an explosive rate – the exact opposite of Warren Buffett’s buy-and-hold myth that made him a millionaire.
