[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 I know you won't agree, but I think you have an outdated view of what a stock really is.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 I think you have an outdated view of what a stock really is.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.