According to the goofy dictionary definition were working with, wealth is a requirement.

That definition doesn’t talk about the relationship between wealth and extracted profits because getting to the bottom of that relationship ultimately ties the two together. There’s no space to explain that if you own productive capital, you’re by definition wealthy.

If we wanted to examine your retail investment portfolio under a broader definition, you could possibly be considered the most petit-ist of bourgeoise under some circumstances, but generally if you have to work for a wage or are expecting to have to work for a wage once your education is over then you’re not a capitalist. Participating in the securities market doesn’t change your relationship to the means of production.

If you made your living as a securities trader, that might be a different story.

I’m not sure what you’re saying about the labor and selling it themselves, but the organization, strategy and marketing are all labor that went into the production of the goods. The capital in the form of facilities and equipment are fixed costs like the raw materials used in production, so any profit from the sale is necessarily coming out of the value of the labor.

Good to know that market manipulation is illegal, surely there’s no examples of markets being manipulated in our recent memory!