Not really, gdp is a snapshot of current activity, but the market cap is a guess of the amount of money the company will throw off in total, adjusted for time and risk.
Market cap is not that at all, that's why Twitter's market cap was 44B and now undefined because its not on the market.
Market cap is the price of the last share trade times total number of shares. Company's current performance and prospects don't really change that much from day to day but you can have large market cap changes because what you are observing is just live betting.
Nope, each buyer has its own motivations. People usually sell when the price increase to their liking in the casino. Shares are traded all the time, not just on the days of dividend payments day. Tesla so far never paid dividends anyway. Maybe there are people who bought shares and don't trade them and wait for a payout, but if you look at the volumes traded you can easily see that they are a very small minority.
You sell when you think the company is overvalued, you buy when you think it is undervalued. Some might treat it as a casino but those are not the big players, as treating it as a casino will most likely lose money and not be profitable.
Paying dividends is just moving money from the company's bank account to the share owners, it doesn't have anything to do with the value of the rest of the company.
> that's really out of topic since we are discussing public markets
You said the market cap is “undefined.” That is incorrect. Market cap is price per share times shares outstanding. If a company has shares, its market cap is defined by at least one among several metrics.
I disagree, it illustrates the current betting market. It doesn't have to do anything with the company as long as the company isn't striken off the market.
I think you say the same thing as I do: the current betting market (company valuation) seems to be a bit out of touch with reality (company's actual value, that is something along the lines: assets - liabilities + expected revenue*time)
We probably don't disagree but I reject the premise of "fair value" for a stock price.
It's not different than Bitcoin price at all, there's no fair value but a price that you think it will increase or decrease. The price, thus market cap can be anything, if Musk can convince his believers to HODL you can end up with market cap larger than the Worlds GDP with trade volumes smaller than a single product they sell.
The speculative aspect of stock prices is a reflection of the time-value of money / discounted future cash flows. This concept does not exist for bitcoin pricing.