The rights of ownership of an asset are the right to control, the right to income, the right of exclusive use, the right to sell.
What rights do you have as a stock owner? Do you have the right of control? No.
Do you have the right to income? No.
Do you have the rights to use what the company owns or makes? Nope.
The only right you own is the right of disposition. The right to sell the stock.
Therefore the value of your ownership of a stock is what someone will pay you for it at any given point in time.
If you think about it, a share of stock is no different from bitcoin. The idea that stocks have some other value is a figment of the collective imagination. It’s a religion.
That’s why, if you are an investor, the only thing you should care about is the direction of the price, not its relationship to someone’s imaginary value standard. The only way to ascertain the most likely direction of the stock market as a whole is via liquidity analysis and technical analysis. For individual stocks it’s via technical analysis.
It is obviously true that some people are good guessers that someone will be willing to pay more for a stock in the future because of its story line. They have a knack.
I’ll stick to the charts, thank you. At least there’s some empiricism to that.
