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)

An ice covered entrance door to the international gene bank Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen, Norway, October 20, 2015. Two consignments of crop seeds will be deposited next year in a “doomsday vault” built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global supplies. The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds, such as beans, rice and wheat against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease. (Photo by Anna Filipova/Reuters)

Demonstrators protest the shooting death of Alton Sterling near the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. July 9, 2016. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

Kite-surfers practice in a water reservoir at the shores of the Mediterranean sea close to the southern Israeli kibbutz of Ziqim during stormy weather, on December 20, 2021. (Photo by Menahem Kahana/AFP Photo)

Hideki Tokoro, president of whaling company Kyodo Senpaku, boards Japan's new whaling mothership, the Kangei Maru, following the ship's launch ceremony at a port in Shimonoseki city, Yamaguchi prefecture on May 21, 2024. The nearly 9,300-tonne ship set sail on its maiden hunting voyage on May 21, heralding a new era for the controversial practice defended by the government as an integral part of national culture. (Photo by Yuichi Yamazaki/AFP Photo)

Visitors wearing face masks walk near the Gwanghwamun, the main gate of the 14th-century Gyeongbok Palace, and one of South Korea's well-known landmarks, in Seoul, South Korea, Saturday, February 22, 2020. South Korea on Saturday reported a six-fold jump in viral infections in four days to 346, most of them linked to a church and a hospital in and around the fourth-largest city where schools were closed and worshipers and others told to avoid mass gatherings. (Photo by Lee Jin-man/AP Photo)

Tourists wear protective masks in Sanur, Bali, Indonesia, 15 March 2020. Indonesia has around 80 active cases of Covid-19. More than 70,000 people worldwide have recovered from coronavirus, nearly half of the total infections recorded since the outbreak began. (Photo by Made Nagi/EPA/EFE)

Riot police wear face masks, as a precautionary measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, allow a women to cross a cordon after a protest by pro-democracy demonstrators at a shopping mall in Hong Kong on May 9, 2020. (Photo by Isaac Lawrence/AFP Photo)