Some of us do.
Besides not being a game of chance, no.
But it is. Of course, it isn't a pure game of chance, like Roulette, but it has chance elements that come in two forms.
First, it's a game of incomplete information, which is just like a game of chance from the player's perspective. To illustrate the difference, consider a player playing Stratego. Your opponent has a piece next to your flag, and he is obviously going to move there. You have a piece next to two concealed pieces. You know that one is a flag, and one is a bomb, but you don't know which one. It's your move. Depending on which you pick, you will either win the game or lose the game, but you have no information on which to make the choice. You pick one and hope for the best.
Of course, an interesting phenomenon then occurs. if the player guesses correctly, and wins the game, he is very likely to say that he contemplated his opponent's psychological state and decided he was more likely to put his flag in that spot than in the other spot. If the player picks the bomb, he is likely to say there was nothing he could do. He just lost because of random failures.
In the stock market, lots of unknown scenarios are going on behind the scenes that, assuming you are not engaged in insider trading, you cannot possibly know, but will affect your stock price. A classic case is a drug company working on a new drug. If approved for sale it could result in massive profits. If the FDA rejects it, there could be massive losses. The investor has no way of knowing, but if he buys the stock and the drug was approved, he is likely to say that he had studied the situation and decided it was a good purchase. If he buys, and the drug is rejected, that was bad luck.
In some cases, it's even more random than that. It's literally random. Company profits can fluctuate due to weather, natural disasters, or untimely deaths of important employees, not to mention unforeseen political developments, sudden appearances of competing technologies and a host of other factors that no one could reasonably predict. There's plenty of luck involved in investing.
This affects our friends the CEOs as well. When those random factors work in his favor, it's because of his good stewardship of the company. When they work against him, there was no way he could have known that would happen. (I googled C. Mike Armstrong after I mentioned him. His utter failure at AT&T was beyond his control, as was his lackluster performance at Comcast. And his stewardship of Hughes? A success, of course. He came in at a difficult time and although the company's value plummeted and the company itself ceased to exist, he did a fantastic job of shepherding it through tough times.)
My opinion of corporate ladder climbers, including almost all non-founder CEOs, is actually worse than that. My observation is that not only do they take credit for good luck and deny responsibility for bad luck, they actually take credit for others' success and lay blame for their own failures on their subordinates. In 30 years of observations from the cubicles, I've seen it again and again.
