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

First, economics is not science - it is money seen through the eyes of sociology and hubris ;-)

Marx's misunderstanding of history and real-world economics and Lenin's subsequent digestion of Engels' view of dialectic materialism never bore any relation to actual human behavior (and seemed pretty disconnected from Lenin's understanding of power, which was much less theoretical and more sophisticated ) and represented millenarian thinking akin to the French Enlightenment's understanding of Freedom. Both required a redesign of humans and human behavior but had no real path to producing such a transformation.

Whatever one thinks about the capitalist model - or the stock market that is the crap shoot side of it - there is no doubt is represents human behavior as it exists in the humans we have and does not require the creation of a New Man for it to work.

People who actually buy and sell stocks have no illusions that the stock price represents anything other than a speculative venture - especially in the short term. In the long term, there is more meaning (hence P/E ratios etc as metrics) but everyone knows stocks prices are not a representation of the value of capital assets or a true picture of the value of intangibles such as branding, intellectual capital etc.

If it were easy, everybody'd be rich {g}

But the wild swings in the stock market are just people playing short-term games to take advantage of other people guessing 'wrong' - there is a lot of 'greater fool' theory involved and I suspect that is your point.

As to loaning money money to people one shouldn't loan money to and then trading those loans like collectible beanie babies or cabbage patch dolls and then finding out that was a bad idea - probably even Marx would have said "Vell, duh!"

That said, it is a game that pays off in real money if you bet right (and costs you real money if you bet wrong) That's not illusory.