>>If you could explain (for free) where did the 98,000 come from, what has created that value, I'm all ears.
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>The 'value' of a stock is not a percentage of the capital assets of the company , it is a claim on a share of future earnings and growth or a bet on somebody else's assessment of those things in a way that will change what others will pay for the claim ( remember you can short stocks to bet on decreased future value as well )

I appreciate the cunning use of apostrophes around the crucial word here.

So, it's all a gamble and guesstimate... I know that economy is a science, with one single axiom as a start: "people will behave the way they think is best for them", which is a firm foundation upon all its theories are built... and on the top of the evolution's chain you have a juggler who juggles two billion balls at a time without actually touching them - they're all in the air. We're just seeing what happens when there are too many jugglers and only so many balls and so much space on the city square... the balls start falling.

Once upon a time there was a theory which said there can't be a value if there's no usage value (i.e. a thing can't have a value if it has no usage) and that extra value can come to be only from labor, which creates added value. The total sum of all value in a country should be expressed with total sum of its currency, at least without a major discrepancy between the two. Introduce stock and fiat money (one of these would be enough, but let them both in, for good measure), and it all becomes very creative. Creative, but not in the sense that there are new ways to increase value (there are some, like using science, improving productivity), but rather in the sense that value seems to find new and highly imaginative ways to get expressed in currency without actually being added to the thing/service of which the value it is.