Some are in it just for the money, others to help buy a meal. Then there are those who trade for fun or to spend time among friends. Millions of investors – pensioners, security guards, high-school students – dominate China's stock markets, conducting about 80 percent of all trades. Retirees gather in brokerage houses dotted around China also to enjoy some company and savour the air conditioning on hot days. Some start as young as 13, trading from home with an eye on future careers in finance. Winning isn't guaranteed. This year, among the most turbulent in China's financial history, its stock markets more than doubled in the six months to May, only to crash amid concerns that growth in the country, which makes everything from cars to steel, is slowing faster than previously thought. (Photo by Aly Song/Reuters)

A picture made available on 20 October 2015 shows a foreign tourist posing for a souvenir photograph with a figure of a tiger head at a private zoo on Phuket Island, Thailand, 17 October 2015. Each day hundreds of tourists, including young children, visit the private tiger zoo where visitors are allowed to touch and pose for photographs with unchained tigers inside their enclosures. (Photo by Rungroj Yongrit/EPA)

An Indonesian woman watches an eruption from the Mount Sinabung volcano from Tiga Pancur village, in Karo in North Sumatra on November 3, 2017. Sinabung roared back to life in 2010 for the first time in 400 years. After another period of inactivity it erupted once more in 2013, and has remained highly active since. (Photo by Ivan Damanik/AFP Photo)

Undercover Israeli police arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during clashes following protests against U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Wednesday, December 13, 2017. (Photo by Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP Photo)

A girl dressed up as a emissary of the Three Wise Men poses for a photo as she waits for their arrival in a helicopter to take part in the traditional Epiphany parade in Ronda, Spain, January 5, 2018. (Photo by Jon Nazca/Reuters)

Girls sleep in the back of their father's moto-taxi as he watches them from the front seat, days after an earthquake in Pedernales, Ecuador, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. A fresh tremor rattled Ecuador before dawn Wednesday, a magnitude-6.1 jolt that set babies crying and shaken residents pouring once again into the streets, fearful of yet more damage following a monster earthquake over the weekend. (Photo by Dolores Ochoa/AP Photo)

A woman smokes a mask bong on the final day of Hempfest, Seattle's annual gathering to promote the legalization of marijuana, on August 17, 2014. (Photo by Jordan Stead/Seattlepi.com)

A woman sells Cuban Communist Party (PCC) official newspaper Granma with a picture of former Cuba's President Fidel Castro at the front page, at the main touristic road in Havana, Cuba, September 14, 2016. (Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)