If you dedicate some time of your life to helping someone (or a multitude) it may happen that you will receive something pleasant in return, sooner or later... but you can't be sure.
It is rather common, however, to choose to dedicate one's time to activities that guarantee the receipt of something pleasant, often in the form of money. We always try to evaluate, as far as possible, the pros and cons of a choice and, barring mistakes, we do not choose what harms us.
If we know a person's history and consider him/her reliable, it may be that we willingly give him/her capital that will help him/her realize his/her business project, in exchange for future profits that he/she promises us, in a more or less guaranteed way.
Naturally, first, we also want to know many aspects of that enterprise... In fact, if the profits of the enterprise were derived from activities that cause harm to us, or that cause damage to a community of which we are part, we would hardly make available the capital to make it happen! (Or, at the very least, we would demand profits that far outweigh the damages.)
The idea that a good investor is one who knows how to relate the risk of losing (all or in part) the capital invested with a convenient "return on investment" is as widespread as it is illusory.
You are not a good investor at all (in the broad sense) if you ignore the possible damages that those who manage your invested capital can cause you in other ways thanks to it!
When you keep capital with a bank that in exchange gives you an income and some "free" services you are not really an investor; you are simply a person who considers it safer not to keep a lot of cash with him/her and, being able to choose a "security provider", chooses the one that offers the most in relation to his/her needs.
In this case you may have the availability of your capital but you are not aware of how the bank makes all the deposits collected profitable. It may be that it engages a good part of it in activities that are profitable for the credit institution but harmful to your community (for example engaging part of it in lobbying for policies contrary to your interests). It may be that the yield that the bank recognizes ends up being, without your knowledge, a partial and small "compensation for damages".
If you choose, reasonably, not to keep that capital in cash, the availability you have consists of being able to transfer it (in whole or in part) to other "security providers". Transfers that take place directly on your demand or through payments for purchases of products and services. In fact, your payments constitute an amount that remains almost entirely in the "circuit of credit institutions"... although in the "availability" of the various recipients.
Our banking transactions, which have such an impact on the amount of our deposit, are nothing more than variations in distribution between various subjects in the invariance of an overall amount that remains in the circuit of credit institutions (and its superstructures).
In this "digital capitalism", where the movable assets of the majority of people are reduced to associations of numbers in the computer system of the circuit of credit institutions, can be "true investors" only subjects who, owning "significant shares of the circuit", exercise political influence through the management of that “total amount of deposits”; and who therefore also know its effects in the various sectors of society.
In European countries that join the euro system, such as Italy, there is no longer a democratic authority that holds significant shares of that circuit; the State is in the same situation as us ordinary citizens; it has "numbers" that attest to the availability of its movable assets but does not have concrete control over how they are made profitable (see LABOR AND THE JOB MARKET).
For sure, the State can exercise political influence through the law, but also the use of this instrument is conditioned by the power of lobbies that own significant shares of that circuit... or by subjects who exploit them to corrupt political actors for their own advantage (see YOU MEET OLIGARCHY).
Obviously, from the point of view of such "true investors", among the "advantages" is included (in addition to the acquisition of wealth and power through inheritance rather than individual merit) the perpetuation of this global system for which, given a certain capital under the same other conditions, profits tend to flow where it is most concentrated... In making a certain capital profitable (for example on the stock market) the advantages of a single decision-making subject compared to many subjects who collectively own the same amount are well known. There is therefore a continuous increase in concentration, even when one of the protagonists loses a bet to the advantage of another; and there are now many states in the world that cannot compete with the largest concentrations of private capital.
I believe that this historical path is not reversible... From within the capitalist system, capitalism can no longer be "demoted" from being the protagonist of politics (through “pervasive financialization”) to a mere real economic system.
And since, from the point of view of planetary resources (in the broad sense), it has become unsustainable it is necessary to overtake it; that is, a social and politically borderline initiative is needed, primarily aimed at the emancipation of the new generations of citizens of the world... on whom will fall the task of devising a better system and following the path towards it.