Comment by lemonademan

If you invested money into a trade where you bought and lost, there is someone else or others who sold and won. You may have lost that particular sum at that time, but someone else gained a part or some of that sum you lost. If you invested in building and opening a shop and eventually closed it because it wasn't making money. We can say the workers hired to construct the store made money from that investment, the manufacturers and wholesalers you bought from made revenue from selling you their products, which you intended to sell for higher prices to make a profit. You are right in your assessment that you could lose money, but that loss was someone else's gain, hence money moved from you to them. In this life, two seemingly opposing ideas could be correct at the same time.