Complete nonsense. Your understanding of investment is entirely flawed. Dividends are one element of the value of a stock, but there are many, many others. Chiefly, the expectation that the stock will rise in value such that you can later sell it for more than you purchased it for.
A parallel to draw very easily is an investment in commodities. Those will never pay a dividend, so therefore they're worthless? Obviously not, you invest in them because you expect their value to rise. Same with a stock.
An asset is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. That is its value. Intrinsic value is an element, but not the most important one.
You also display either a very basic misunderstanding or willful ignorance. There's no gambling involved - investing is not dumb chance. There are real companies behind these purchases with real expectations of future growth and thus increase in value. Or vice versa.
Everyone loves the "you can't beat the S&P" trope, but that's also just ignorance. There's a reason that proprietary trading firms generate more profit per employee than any other business in the world.
I do personally know people who do invest and it is 100% gambling for a lot of small "investors". The only ignorance is to pretend it is not a thing. This point becomes super clear once you start looking at trading apps targeting this market.
> There's no gambling involved - investing is not dumb chance
First a gambling does not have to be a theoretically pure dumb chance in order to be gambling. Second, in practice it basically the same thing as betting on horses used to be.
There is a reason why small investors loose money on their investments on average despite markets going up. Because what they do is not investing.
> There are real companies behind these purchases with real expectations of future growth and thus increase in value.
Oh common, this relationship is quite broken for exactly the most known companies.
> Everyone loves the "you can't beat the S&P" trope, but that's also just ignorance.
This seems like a willful misinterpretation.
They say “you won’t beat the S&P” because maybe some HFT firm with highly secretive and advanced technology and MIT PhD quants might… but you, Mr. Retail McDumbMoney, don’t stand a chance.
And it’s still nonsense. Many people beat the S&P and this meme needs to die. It’s considerably easier to beat the S&P when you’re not working at the scale of a hedge fund.
> the expectation that the stock will rise in value such that you can later sell it for more than you purchased it for.
If the person who holds the share can never expect to be paid for holding the share, then you're describing a Ponzi scheme. Eventually you cannot find another sucker willing to pay in even more.
> commodities
Are used as manufacturing inputs and thus a commodity investment injects liquidity in exchange for a return, should manufacturing demand (for those inputs) rise. Their intrinsic value derives from their consummability.
Stocks/corporations do not have intrinsic value beyond the sum of the fair market prices of the assets belonging to the corporation, should they be liquidated and dispersed among shareholders... which would be a dividend. At the end of the day the only reasonable means to price a stock is a calculation of expected dividends.
A parallel to draw very easily is an investment in commodities. Those will never pay a dividend, so therefore they're worthless? Obviously not, you invest in them because you expect their value to rise. Same with a stock.
An asset is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. That is its value. Intrinsic value is an element, but not the most important one.