[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]

When you buy bonds, the government guarantees it'll buy the bonds back. It's a loan with interest. When you buy a stock that doesn't have any inherent value, due to a lack of tangible benefits of ownership, then you're gambling that somebody in the future will buy it from you for no real reason other than a shared illusion that the piece of paper has a worth, and is somehow tied to comapny performance.

Again, it's the lack of dividends and the lack of any other tangible benefits of owning the stock like voting rights. I feel like you're so far down the "line goes up" rabbit hole of stock trading, that you can't even think clearly about what you're actually buying, and why would anybody buy it from you in the future.

[vasco]

Whoever reads this without knowledge will think voting rights have something to do with dividends and you keep making this wrong assertion.

So as a warning to whoever reads this, do a search for "dual class stocks", and see how many companies sell stock without voting rights as % of any index. Then see how many don't issue dividends. You'll see it's a completely separate subject.

[StackRanker3000]

I don’t think you’re fully getting what they’re trying to say. They’re not asserting that dividends and voting rights are somehow inextricably linked or that you can’t have one without the other.

They’re simply listing the two things they think actually provide any real value when owning stock, as opposed to ”line goes up”.

In other words, they’re asking why owning stock has actual value. They dismiss ”line goes up”, which only leaves dividends and voting rights. By that logic, if you aren’t paid any dividends and you don’t have voting rights, what is the point of owning the stock, except to gamble? That is what they want to know.

And then I think that what you have been saying, correctly in my opinion, is that ”line goes up” actually does have real value. But no one is trying to claim that dividends and voting rights aren’t separate things.

[StackRanker3000]

I agree with you, as indicated by the second paragraph I wrote. I was just paraphrasing and tried to answer what I believe the other person was asking (I’m happy to be corrected if it was not).