[mrtksn]

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.

[Jensson]

> what you are observing is just live betting

Yes, and those bets are guesses on how much the company will return as the poster you responded to said.

[mrtksn]

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.

[Jensson]

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.

[apwell23]

> volumes traded you can easily see that they are a very small minority.

Not sure how volumes traded says anything about buy and hold investors. It could just be a single stock traded a billion times?

[CorrectHorseBat]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Twitter's market cap was 44B and now undefined because its not on the market

It’s still absolutely on a market, down to being valued and trading. It’s just not on a public market.

[mrtksn]

It can be true if there are people buying and selling stocks among themselves but that's really out of topic since we are discussing public markets.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[mrtksn]

I agree, you are technically correct which is the best kind of correct I guess but it's irrelevant IMHO.

[JumpCrisscross]

It’s actually fundamentally germane to your argument, since in private markets one doesn’t have “large market cap changes because what you are observing is just live betting.” What input you use as “price” is the relevant bit, with the CNBC reductive convention of price = last trade being the source of your problem, not market cap per se.

[mrtksn]

I see point, maybe I should have been clearer.