this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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A stock represents a share in the ownership of a company.
It has no inherent requirement that a company 'make things' or produce dividends.
Sure you can invest in companies that make nothing, have no actual value, and pay no dividends... In which case you'd be investing in something a lot more like crypto.
Or you could, you know, not invest in crappy companies nor speculative assets and spend more than five minutes "researching" a thing before sinking significant money into it. Most reputable companies pay dividends and you can even look up the average dividend yield of the stock over years.
GOOGL, AMZN, BIIB, EW, META, none pay dividends but are still generally considered sound investments (META's bullshit forced VR pivot not withstanding).
My portfolio has grown less from dividend stocks (with automatic reinvestment) than from growth stocks without dividends. Your entire positioning argument itself quickly becomes speculative nonsense the more that time passes.
Crypto is volatile and most of it is vapor ware, but as a flip side to that same exact coin, most stocks are volatile and the business plans are vaporware crafted from few centuries of practice taking peoples money. It's all a shell game of belief, don't get too lost in belief to see real trends and changes as they are happening.
There's also considerable strategy differences in terms of making money with investments versus protecting money with investments, and you'd really have to preface an argument with enough context to make it particularly valid over another.
My original point (and the one I still insist is true) is that owning shares in a reputable company and "investing" in the latest shit coin aren't the same thing for a garden variety of different reasons, but the conflationary engine that is your average crypto bro wants to pretend they all are.
And that's leaving it out that one way that the overall stock market differs from crypto greatly is that the government can, has, and likely will continue to take actions to prop it up.