[prodigal_erik]

Of course you can, you just may not enjoy the answer. Without dividends, there's no actual mechanism for corporate success to benefit shareholders, there's only how "investors" assume each other will probably react to the news. Even share buybacks are priced through this hall of mirrors. A rational valuation is not an attempt to predict where the speculators' random walk will be at some point (there's every sign that can't be done) but the amount you can pay in confidence of ending up with a profit regardless of all that, based solely on how the company plans to reward buy-and-hold investors. These days the answer is often "only speculators think these shares should have any value", and Mark Cuban astutely likened those stocks to baseball cards.

[dereg]

Market expectations do price shares. These expectations can be assumptions about growth, dividend payouts, and such. You're claiming that there is no random walk component, which there clearly is. There is no such thing as paying an amount "in confidence of ending up with a profit" in the world of equities investment — that's an absurd statement and not a means for rational valuation. You can mitigate your portfolio risk but you will never eliminate systematic risk.