Try buying something with your APPL stock before converting it back to USD at the current market rate and tell me where your value went
Why would I do such a thing? It sounds like a giant waste of time.
Even if I were to, say, buy a Microsoft Tablet for 1 share of AAPL stock, no wealth has been transferred into or out of Apple Computer. Instead, the vendor now has 1 more share of AAPL and 1 less Surface, and I have 1 more Surface and 1 less share of AAPL.
And you have set the last sale price of APPL at 1 Tablet. If the current price of APPL was higher than the sticker price of a Tablet you have just gotten ripped off and vice versa. Some of the value just evaporated until the next sale, AKA arbitrage.
The point was that you can't do that even if you wanted to as the 'stock' is completely electronic without a way for you to transfer it's value to your seller of Tablets without first converting it to USD. The current system has no convenient general way to transfer their wealth in AAPL stocks from yourself to any person without going through an intermediary, which is the USD and the stock market itself. When you actually held the paper stocks you could give them to someone, now that value is stored in bits in a trading system.
I think your are confating my argument with 'giving' money to Bitcoin, which is a bit odd since nobody controls Bitcoin. Buying Bitcoin mean you are putting faith into the system, much like buying AAPL means you are putting faith into AAPL in hopes that the value of that stock with increase or at least not fall. If a large shareholder lost faith in AAPL and sold all their shares, the flux of money out of the system would devastate the investors, not APPL. Or at least not financially...the lack of faith might be quite devastating for APPL though.
I chose "Surface" as something that was around the price of a share of AAPL stock. I didn't think that would become an issue, but apparently it did. So just do the same thing with gallons of gas measured down to the cc, if you wanted.
PS: There are such things as fractional shares of stock.
The current system has no convenient general way to transfer their wealth in AAPL stocks from yourself to any person without going through an intermediary
Why is this relevant at all? Are you trying to say that Bitcoin is a more convenient form of currency than stock? No kidding.
Buying Bitcoin mean you are putting faith into the system
And other people are selling, which means they are losing faith in the system.
A stock is priced by the market based on the current value of all expected future dividend payments. ("Growth stocks" are just one more abstraction removed but in the end it all comes down to expected future earnings.) One-tenth of a company that will earn $10 a year every year from now to eternity has a value you can work out on paper.
4 dividends over 17 years, starting again about 7 months ago. Sorry for not knowing the latest news as all I've been hearing is that they don't. And what formula will give proper and accurate pricing on that many data points?
Don't answer that, this is getting silly. Have a good day. :)
Why would I do such a thing? It sounds like a giant waste of time.
Even if I were to, say, buy a Microsoft Tablet for 1 share of AAPL stock, no wealth has been transferred into or out of Apple Computer. Instead, the vendor now has 1 more share of AAPL and 1 less Surface, and I have 1 more Surface and 1 less share of AAPL.