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Comment by GianFabien | Hacker News Reader

There's only two reasons to buy stocks:

  1) for future cashflows (aka dividends) derived from net profits.

  2) to on-sell to somebody willing to pay even more.

When option (2) is no longer feasible, the bubble pops and (1) resets the prices to some multiple of dividends. Economics 101.

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> ...resets the prices to some multiple of dividends

But wouldn't you want to pay more for a company that has a history of revenue and income growth than one in a declining industry? And you have to look at assets on the company's books; you're not just buying a company, you're buying a share of what it owns. What if it has no income, but you think there's a 10% chance it'll be printing money in 5 years?

That's why prices won't naively reset to a multiple of ~~dividends~~ income (see the dividend irrelevance theory) across the board. Someone will always put a company's income in context.

yes, but there will always be a #2 with QE being normalized now.

Just like land :)

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