[vasco]

It is you who missed the point. Google the fiscal difference between dividends or no dividends and you'll understand. There's nothing preventing you from selling exactly as much % shares each quarter as you want to create your own dividend, specially with fractional shares. These days the difference is merely fiscal and people that say "if there's no dividends its all fake" seem to want to portray it as bad when for most people it's way better to let it compound and only sell and trigger taxable events when they want to. I don't see how the board of some company deciding when I have taxable events is an advantage if the company removes the same value of shares from circulation by doing a buyback.

Dividends are just adding financial inefficiency and removing choice from the shareholder.

[torlok]

Since you're still struggling, I'll try to be as clear as possible. Why does a stock have value if it doesn't give you a share of the company profits, or voting rights?

[vasco]

You're adding voting rights into the discussion when they are separate from dividends is something I don't understand. You can have voting rights and no dividend.

Regarding the share of the profits I already explained. You have your share of the profits in form of liquid stock that you can decide to sell. It's the same thing.

[torlok]

The discussion from the beginning was about the value of stocks. Traditionally it's a share of profits in the form of dividends and voting rights. If the stock doesn't pay dividends and the founder has 51%, then you get none of that, so why does the stock have any value. That's the discussion here. Try to read and understand the question before engaging next time.

[vasco]

You're talking about old things. Its not common anymore for voting rights and dividends to be as intertwined as you say, and you keep ignoring all I said about fiscal differences while telling me to read. Anyway have a nice day was still good to type down our thoughts.

[StackRanker3000]

I think you can rephrase the question as “where is the value in owning stock? If it’s only that you hope to sell it to someone else at a higher price later, isn’t it just a pyramid scheme? At least with dividends and voting rights there are clear and tangible benefits apart from speculation”.

And the answer could then be that you’re investing in a company which allows them to grow, and your money with them. Or that you store your money in a medium that hopefully at least keeps up with inflation (especially if you’ve spread the risk). Or just that you’ve taken a gamble and hope that other people will think the stock is worth more at some later point than it was when you bought it.

[vasco]

It's as much a pyramid scheme as believing the government will buy back your government bonds or backup your dollar. End of the day you always need to believe any asset you own has its valued derived on other people wanting to buy it off of you, if you call that a pyramid scheme then the whole financial system is a pyramid scheme. You probably don't value your car or your laptop or your house as zero just because nobody might want to buy them off of you, while technically true.

You know other people can look at a balance sheet of a company and also judge it's value based on how much it produces and on the expectation of future buybacks that will increase your share's worth. I wouldn't call the absense of dividends the maker of a pyramid scheme.

[torlok]

Thanks for taking the time to understand my question. It goes without saying that without any tangible value, you're just gambling that somebody will buy a stock from you in the future. I'm wondering if there's some other mechanism at work here that gives these tech stocks value, other than, as you said, basically a pyramid scheme mechanism of buying stocks because somebody with the same "line goes up" mentality will do that in the future and buy us out.