Why do stocks have any value?
Going to get flamed for this but looking for actual answers - what actually makes a non-dividend stock worth anything?
Standard answer is you own a piece of the company. Fine. But say I own 1% of a company that never pays a dividend, never does a buyback, never gets acquired. I'm not entitled to a dollar of its cash flows, ever. So what am I actually holding besides something worth whatever the next guy pays for it?
And when a company does pay a dividend, the stock drops by roughly the dividend amount. Left pocket to right pocket. So what even counts as a real return of capital to a shareholder vs. just an accounting reshuffle?
I know the textbook answer is the share = PV of future cash that eventually accrues to you. But for something like AMZN that "eventually" has been theoretical for 25 years. Is the whole thing just a bet that capital comes back someday? Or am I missing a cleaner mechanism?
Why do you brush your teeth everyday? Certainly no short term value but much like reinvestment in ROIC the reinvestment in your health pays dividends in the future
Paying a divy or doing a stock buyback is a choice the Board can make overnight.
Just because you've held on to your house or apartment for 20 years without selling it doesn't mean it's worthless.
Thanks for the response - I would argue that a house has value without selling it because I can live in it or rent it out for a profit, but hard to say the same for a stock.
You can't live inside a stock, but you can certainly lend it to short-sellers and pocket a fee (this is a massive business, needless to say).
You can also think about a stock as pricing the option value of one day announcing it's paying a dividend. AAPL for instance used to never return any cash to shareholders as recently as 10 years ago. Nowadays it buys back hundreds of billions of $ of its own shares each year.
Non-dividend stocks derive value from retained earnings (cash reinvested for future return), takeover value, or theoretical future payouts. If a company generates $1 per share and reinvests it to yield a 15% return, they are using that capital to create more value than the typical shareholder could generate on their own. I also think this premise is slightly wrong "I'm not entitled to a dollar of its cash flows, ever" because in a liquidation scenario barring distress, you owning 1% of that company would entitle you to the proceeds of the assets that business owns.
Yes when a company pays a dividend, the stock theoretically drops by the dividend amount because the company's total assets and cash reserves have physically decreased. The stock market compromises of 1000s of players with different duration - perhaps that "eventually" has been too long for your hold period, but some pension fund x in ohio wants to assign value based on what it might do in 2070 or whatever (read alternatively: they don't have another opportunity to invest in).
Thanks for the response - I would push that owning 1% of the company would not entitle me to proceeds of the assets that business owns, as you are last in line compared to creditors and preferred share holders. No guarantee you'll see a dime of anything
True but the only reason you have 1% of that business is bc you as an equity investor validated the equity residual when you decided to invest in it
What do you mean by shareholder coercion? And why is a dividend considered a real return of capital if my investment in the equity just drops by the same amount
this is the idea of the DCF
sorry if this is a dumb question but if the Company grows its profits > WACC / an alternative return would you not rather receive the dividends in the future?
that's what point 3 says, holding dividends doesn't mean you don't get anything, it means your future right to dividends is more valuable based on the expectation that you may be able to get more dividends, hence not distributing dividends is a great strategy if ROIC > WACC unless shareholders push for distributions
but this is still looking at one of the easiest anchors of the value of a stock, because gladly we live in a capitalist society with free markets and high levels of financialization, so in almost all cases you'll be able to cash out from a stock at a higher price than a simple dividend discounted CF model purely because of supply and demand or growth expectations, which means someone will pay you a bit more than what a DCF might say because he expects the next buyer to also think like him (so lots of things in the markets are driven by Soros' explanation on reflexivity when there is no clear technical/"financially justifiable" anchor)
You can easily construct a no arbitrage argument to show no dividend cannot mean no value. Consider a company like Google who had long-standing communication that they would not pay a dividend despite ~$100bn in cash. If Google stock was worthless because they didn’t pay a dividend, you OP would purchase the company in entirety for $1, then distribute the $100bn in cash on balance sheet to yourself — resulting in $100bn in risk free arbitrage profits. Given risk free arbitrage, everyone else would be willing to do this too. Thus the fact Google would never pay a dividend has no bearing on whether the stock has value.
This is a good answer thanks
It’s worth the right to sell it for more than what you bought it for.
All the models, analyses and mechanisms are ultimately answering two questions that an investor cares about: how much is this thing worth now and when should I sell it? Value and Timing, that’s it.
Most of us plebs who stock pick as individual contributors should buy stocks with the intention of holding the majority of them through retirement, where we can cash out. That’s why 20-30 year models are helpful, but it’s always been theoretical because nobody can predict the future and how every actor involved with a company will act in the future. If a stock you bought with the intention of holding until you retire 20 years from now starts to tank, you have only two questions to ask: How much is this worth (partially informed by your opinion of the market’s reaction and your own ideas) and is it time to sell it? When should I sell if not now? At what price?
I don’t think is that complicated of a concept to understand
Right, but this comes down to the fundamental question of why its worth anything, if its only value is selling to somebody else. I don't get how in this case its different from buying a rock that somebody will buy later at a higher price
wrong
DCF valuation is an exercise which tells you that based on receiving X amount of CFs for Y years, I am indifferent between taking $xxx now by selling the stock or just holding the stock for Y years
multiples/precedents --> supply and demand based
Why does someone want dividends that are coming from after tax earnings to then pay an additional tax on the dividend? Doesn’t it make more sense for the company to utilize the dividend payment to grow its value faster?
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