[WikipediasBad]

>Owning a stock entitles you to a share of current/future assets/profits of the business.

Can you provide me with some concrete examples of famous, high profile tech stocks like facebook and snapchat giving a "share of their current/future assets/profits of the business" to stockholders? As far as I know, there is no promise of current or future assets that they will pay out or distribute to shareholders barring legal actions and demands of liquidation, forfeiture etc all of which are not part of the simple "stock owning experience" that can be used as a counter example here.

>And no, you don't necessarily need dividends, cash on the balance sheet is very real and there's plenty of ways it can end up in your pockets other than dividends.

Please do tell me how cash on facebook's balance sheet can end up in my pocket if I own FB common stock? What are some concrete examples that could happen. Then, how about some concrete examples that have actually happened?

[alexasmyths]

"Can you provide me with some concrete examples of famous, high profile tech stocks like facebook and snapchat giving a "share of their current/future assets/profits of the business""

Yes.

Facebook. Google. Microsoft. Amazon.

--> A company does not need to pay dividends in order to 'return value to investors' <---

This is a common misunderstanding of valuation.

--> Whether a company pays dividends or not is technically irrelevant <--

The only real relevance in 'share buybacks' is the ability of the corporation to generated yield from that cash, more than the investor could otherwise. I.E. A large, doddling company who is sitting on tons of cash, but generating very little yield, would be urged to pay dividends. Companies like Amazon, which can generate more yield from re-investing - should do that.

Key point: stock ownership implies ownership of the assets - so whether it's in Amazon's bank account or in yours - it doesn't matter - if you own stock, you 'own' that money.

The only question is - do you want Amazon to 'keep investing' (because they are good/bad at it) or do you want the money transferred to your account (because maybe you can do better).

The increase in value of the stock is economically/technically the same thing as a 'dividend payment'.

[imtringued]

The money from facebook's balance sheet doesn't end up in your pocket because they have a use better for it than you. If they can earn $1.1 on every $1 in their balance sheet then it's in your interest that it's not landing in your pocket. Dividends are paid out because companies have excess profit that they can't further invest to make more revenue. You as an investor can then redirect the money to another company X that badly needs it as opposed to facebook directly investing in company X.

A token has no value.

It's inconvenient to acquire entire large companies and then liquidate them. So what we do is we divide the company into a million little pieces of paper that cannot be liquidated if you don't own all of them. Of course you are now mad that you can't liquidate your share but unless you owned all shares you couldn't liquidate them previously either. Nothing has changed in this regard.

Except ownership of miniscule parts of companies is now a whole lot easier and quicker. It's no longer a privilege of people with a multi billion networth!

[anon1385]

>Can you provide me with some concrete examples of famous, high profile tech stocks like facebook and snapchat giving a "share of their current/future assets/profits of the business" to stockholders?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/dividends-and-stock...

[WikipediasBad]

I'm not talking about dividends. I made that extremely clear. A lot of companies pay zero dividends and also make it clear they have absolutely no plans of paying future dividends either so there is no expected value of future profits that peg the stock price. There is no rights of voting or any kind of classical definition of "ownership" pegged to the stock. Look at SNAP, hundreds of millions of dollars of volume is traded per day of SNAP on exchanges. If I removed the ticker name from my post, would you think I was talking about a token or stock?

[simo7]

It happens all the times, take a share buyback for instance.

A company uses its cash reserves (generated by operating profits or assets sales) to purchase back some of its own shares.

As the same 1 share entitles you to a bigger percentage of the business (the number of total shares has decreased), the stock price is pushed up.

After that you can immediately put money in your pocket by selling the appreciated shares you own.

To give you a specific example Apple has a buyback program open since a while. But it's a common practice really.

[WikipediasBad]

Fair example, but that's also not what I meant. The price of SNAP, FB, or GOOG stock isn't correlated with a potential buyback of only a small amount of shares back. That doesn't seem to be where the value is pegged. I don't think SNAP has done or is expected to do a single buyback in the foreseeable future. Hundreds of millions of dollars of SNAP volume is traded on exchanges per day. Where does that value seem to come from? My argument is that it comes from the same abstract consensus that makes tokens have the same behavior on exchanges, and literally just that. Nothing more. I know you won't agree, but I think you have an outdated view of what a stock really is. Newer stock offerings in tech like FB and more and more like SNAP are behaving like tokens rather than classical stocks. They show no properties of classical ownership aside from being registered with the SEC as a security.

>After that you can immediately put money in your pocket by selling the appreciated shares you own.

Ya, you can sell them to someone else. The same way you can sell the token to another speculator. This statement of yours does not establish a substantiative difference between tokens and stock.

[simo7]

> I think you have an outdated view of what a stock really is.

Yeah many people tend to believe that "everything has changed" every once in a while.

There are records of claims like that since the mid 17th century and continously thereafter.

The way I see it things tend to repeat themselves and never really change in the stock market. A more historical point of view could be eye-opening, at least it was for me.

> That doesn't seem to be where the value is pegged.

It is in a way or the other. In case of Apple there's a pretty direct evidence, in other cases it's more indirect.

You could see it as a floor price. Companies can be valued way more than the value they produce/own but it's difficult that they are valued less than that.

Cannot say the same of a token.

> The same way you can sell the token to another speculator.

The whole point here is that you DO NOT have to necessarily rely on other people expectations to make/loose money with a stock.

You DO have to with a token. That's the difference between speculation and investing.

Why is that? Say a company keeps on generating profits and making buybacks yet the price keeps on falling: it won't be long before it gets noticed by people with enough resources who can take control and distribute dividends.

This inefficiency is so easy to exploit that de facto the market just aknowledges the value pushing the price up.

Yes of course you can also treat a stock as a token and just speculate on it, just base your decisions on what other people will think that the others will think that you'll think etc.

But you don't have to ! You do have a choice, which a token doesn't give you.