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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how "the value of this is that someone will buy it back from you later" to be different from a Ponzi scheme.

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I can see what you mean if very speculative or whatever, but many (most?) publicly traded companies earn money and own tangible assets.

Buying shares means you own some of that; that is the value.

These companies likely pay their employees, and as a shareholder you get to partake and harvest value, without having to work for it.

If the company earns more than last year, the stock should be worth more. But of course, valuation clouds the picture, where dividends are usually simpler to model.

This just sounds like nonsense to me. Why would it be "more valuable" to have a piece of paper with the name of a company on it that makes more money on it than a company that made less money if it never translates to actually getting money from having it? You might as well be describing baseball cards, because someone else will want to pay more for a card that has a player who does really well even though they don't get anything from having it. That might be reasonable for collectors, but it's a pretty clearly insane basis for such a huge portion of our economic activity.

Again, a baseball card doesn’t earn money or do anything profitable in the real physical world. A company often does.

It’s no more “a piece of paper”, than a deed over a piece of land is. Would you also consider that “a collectible”?

You’re entitled to have your opinion, but I disagree with you on this.

> Again, a baseball card doesn’t earn money or do anything profitable in the real physical world. A company often does.

Amazon currently has close to 11 billion shares of stock (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/shares...). Do you seriously believe that 1/11,000,000,000th control over Amazon in terms of voting rights is worth $240? A single vote is indistinguishable from meaningless.

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