[adrianbg]

I have longstanding confusion on this subject. What if dividends are never paid? To my layman's intuition it seems like a more sensible basis for stock valuation is as a fraction of the value of the entire company. This is only equivalent to your definition if profit is equivalent to dividends.. right?

[coopdog]

If they were never paid one day either the company finally dies or it gets wound up. On wind up day, assuming the company was profitable there'd be one huge pay out (ie dividend)

More realistically if you look at Microsoft and Apple, they were trying to never pay dividends, but they finally just had so much cash it was the only sensible thing to do

[adrianbg]

I don't agree. A company can never pay dividends then be bought out by a company that also never pays dividends.

I'm thinking now that there are two components to a stock's value: a concrete component, since a share represents a part of the company, and a volatile abstract component depending on the amount of market demand for it at the moment (eg. in case of a hostile takeover).