Why I Still Love Investing

Stock-market crash, billions wiped out, blah, blah, blah. This Foolish investor explains why he's happily investing in shares without a care in the world.

While playing in the weekly poker game in my local pub last night, I was asked whether I played online Texas Hold 'Em.I replied, "Absolutely not!" and went on to explain that I hate gambling, having had a serious casino addiction in the Nineties. I've been 'clean' for the past seven years, but I don't mind paying a tenner to enjoy the company of my friends for a few hours over several hands of poker.Another player then remarked, "Aha, but you invest in shares, so you've just swapped one casino for another!" which led me to give the following defence for long-term investing in shares:1) Investing is neither gambling nor speculatingAs renowned fund manager Peter Lynch once remarked,"Although it's easy to forget sometimes, a share is not a lottery ticket... it's part-ownership of a business."To me, investing isn't about making a quick buck or taking a punt on a highly risky venture. It's about buying into strong, well-managed businesses which will grow and prosper over the decades to come. What's more, I have a long time to win big, because I have about 27 years to go until I reach state retirement age. Hence, as I'm playing a very long game, I need strong, successful companies to make my millions. No crazy gambles for me!2) I love capital gains and dividendsIf I buy a share and the price later rises, I've made a profit, known as a capital gain. Over decades, these capital gains really mount up, but so do the dividends (the income paid by shares, usually twice-yearly).Indeed, after almost two decades of investing, a significant slice of my household income now comes from the dividends paid by the shares which my wife and I own. However, we have no need of this extra income now, so we reinvest these dividends by buying yet more shares, further boosting our capital gains in the years to come.3) I love buying when prices are fallingAlmost all of my poker buddies suggested that I must be very depressed at the moment, what with the FTSE 100 index falling by around a tenth since its peak in April. I shook my head and quoted Warren Buffett, the world's greatest investor and its second-richest individual:"I feel like an oversexed guy in a whorehouse. Now is the time to invest and get rich."(Apologies for the earthiness of this quote, but Buffett has never been one for political correctness, and he said this in 1974!)I'm currently buying shares while others are keen to sell, because, according to one valuation known as the price-earnings ratio (P/E), the FTSE 100 index (which measures the value of the one hundred biggest UK-listed companies) is the cheapest it has been since 1994.In fact, the Footsie is now cheaper than it was at the bottom of the 2000-03 stock-market crash, and it's probably as cheap as it's been since the start of the Nineties (my data doesn't go back beyond 1993). Hence, I'm investing with confidence, knowing that I'm enjoying a margin of safety which I won't see very often in the years to come!4) I love low-cost, tax-free investingIn recent years, I've been putting some fairly hefty sums into shares. In fact, I've invested the equivalent of several years' wages in the last twelve months alone!However, I've done this on the cheap, by using a low-cost online stockbroker which only charges £12.50 per trade, regardless of its size. Thus, on a £10,000 purchase (I buy often but I very rarely sell), buying commission of £12.50 works out to be 0.125% of my investment, which is cheap as chips.Furthermore, I like to invest in low-cost index trackers, which passively track a share index up and down with little human intervention, and in Exchange Traded Funds, which are shares which behave in a similar way to trackers. With total charges of just 0.3% to 0.4% a year, I know that I won't be paying expensive charges which go towards a fund manager's next Ferrari!Finally, if you're still worried about falling share prices and screens filled with red numbers, here's a thought for you. If you're buying shares tomorrow, do you want the price to go down or up overnight? As someone who will be a heavy buyer of shares for many years to come, I'm happy that prices have dropped recently, because my future returns will be that much greater!More: Use the Fool to compare investments and compare savings accounts!