[bluecalm]

Man, it really doesn't matter if they pay out money or store it in a box. The box still belongs to the company. They can always pay out later or someone else may need a box full of money. Of course it's even better if they do something more useful with the money than just storing it in a box.

[shanusmagnus]

They can pay out later, sure. But they needn't pay out anything, ever. They could make a zillion dollars next year and you'd get none, directly. That's the point. Whatever you could get by trading the share is based on somebody's belief in its value, for some definition of "value" (see e.g., Tesla.)

People trade stock as if the companies were yielding something to the stock owners. Many don't. Acting "as if" the company is making those payments -- imputing a price to the stock according to the underlying fundamentals, or some temporally discounted variant -- is a fantasy. It is a symbolic act. An exercise in recursion, anchored in nothing.

The story the market is telling is a very different kind of story, now.