>>Just listening to a show that is exalting Google's share price of over $500. just a few months afer buying non-earning YouTube for $1 billion+.
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>>I have only a primitive understanding of the stock market, and one very strong characteristic of the stock market, at least over the latter part of my lifetime, is the lemming-like propensity to 'believe in a model' and pour heavy cash into it. Most model turn out to be flawed when put into practise so lots of money is lost.
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>IMO, the stocks are funny money - converted into real money by those who sell on time. why funny money? Because they are more or less unrelated to the actual worth of the company; their price is tied, instead, to the promise of growth. It's a sort of pyramid scheme, where you're doomed to either grow forever or sink overnight. The two noteworthy exceptions to this are the few stable companies that nobody writes about, as they don't make the news, don't get heavily traded (and thus generate fewer commissions for the brokers), and the heavily subsidized huge companies as the air transporters currently are.

So much wrong with this, but I'll just address the end. There are some 17000+ companies publicly traded in the US alone. Very few of them get written about.