by Sixstrings » Wed 12 May 2010, 00:05:54
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jbrovont', 'I')'m with you 100% on this SS. Stock exchanges (at least in theory) are supposed to provide a valuable service to our society.
When you think about it, it's really hard to make any sense of the stock market. It all just seems like a ponzi to me, a lot like the over-inflated tulip market the Dutch had going in 1637 (in case you never heard the story, yeah it was a massive bubble and it all crashed in on itself).
At its core, owning a share of stock means you own a portion of a corporation. But stocks are so incredibly overvalued, that really your ownership of a share has no relation to anything tangible. Shareholders have very few rights and no input at all (unless you have a large percentage of the company's shares).
I think owning stock would only make sense to me if the company paid a dividend, and if you could expect to see a profit from those dividends after a reasonable period of time.
But most companies don't even pay dividends, and the ones that do it's never enough to make the stock worth owning just for the dividend. Ok, maybe there are a few that do have a high dividend, but the fact remains that most investors are only in the market to resell their shares at a higher price.
And that's where I get confused.. if the share you own is already worthless because the company has never and will never pay you a dividend that's high enough to warrant the share price, then what makes that share worth anything to someone else?
If the company decides to buy back its stock, or if another company makes a cash offer in a takeover, then that's tangible and makes sense. But for the most part, your share of stock is really worthless because you're not getting a dividend and therefore have no real share in the company's profits.
The only social purpose of the stock market is to fund new business ventures. But once that stock becomes insanely overvalued, the further inflated trading of that stock has ceased to serve any useful social purpose -- what you're left with is a big casino, and a lot of people skimming wealth from the economy.
Now add in "derivatives," the algorithmic robo-trading, government printing press money pouring into the market, and the fact that everyone's pensions are tied up in the market and what you end up with is a mess of Dutch tulip craze proportions.