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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

Just because of inflation you would expect more companies to exceed 1 and 2 trillion dollar market caps over time. Their existence is not a problem to be solved. Google search, maps, email, books, scholar etc. are wonderful services that have created immense value.

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2 trillion dollars worth of value, though? Doubtful.

Market cap has almost nothing to do with value already created. It’s the consensus guess at the discounted value of future cash flows.

Future cash flows is usually pretty strongly related to the current state of things, but adjusted based on expectations of how it will play out in the future.

I'd be surprised if a non-negligible fraction of investors actually made that calculation. Most buy for other reasons.

Then we have the ginormous index funds who buy when buys are happening.

We just collectively decided that the best thing for society is if everyone just buys stocks for their savings. Either directly or through pension funds. And now we're pretty much stuck with that.

Well, that's not actually the stock price. But it is a rough floor on the stock price.

Meme stocks can get bid up into crazy territory and stay there arbitrarily long. But if a stock goes way below its fundamental value, someone will buy the company at that discount.

Indeed. Because of the price mechanism they don't have to. Provided that some do, of course.

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