Ok, here's the distinction I was meaning to point out about stock when we were talking. I just thought of a better way to articulate it:
You can create shares of non-existent item X with a certain price, and you can just say that the shares are worth whatever you want. You can then buy and sell the shares. People can make money, loose money by investing, etc. However, the shares of item X don't really have intrinsic value. The investments in X have utility, but the shares have no real value.
If you have a business, and you sell shares, they (typically) do have intrinsic value. I don't mean that you can actually use 1/1000th of the business assets in everyday life. I just mean that the share has value. Even if the price of the share *never* fluctuates, it has a certain value.
True I practically wouldn't want to buy a stock that never fluctuated in price, however in some cases I would, like if I needed an alternative to buying currency that was inflating so fast that it was loosing value. People used to keep cows to maintain their wealth... because cows have value ... part of a company is like a cow, something with value.
So, I mean stock has intrinsic value. The exception is when the company is actually worth nothing at all, but the stock price is still high.
And, to give an example of something *without* intrinsic value: US dollars and bitcoins. However, they do have a price, like the item X above. You can't do anything directly useful with them* and they don't represent a share of anything useful. They actually are useful (for the purpose of trade) but they don't represent a share of anything useful.
*With bills, I suppose you could burn them for fuel or use them to clean your teeth, but that's about it.
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