Not in the sense that one is a Ponzi scheme and the other isn’t. Not in the sense that one is depending on others to buy the stock and the other isn’t depending on others giving you money.
Every single physical good that is bought and sold involves ownership transfer, and that transfer of ownership represents the only way the initial owner can profit from the transaction.
Yes, the owner will often do some sort of work to make the good more valuable, but your company also has a staff of people working to make the company more valuable.
I’m suprised no one has picked up on this yet. Just because Gates has 6 billion votes and you have one, the value of your vote isn’t diminished. If there were 12 billion and one shares in the company and George Bush owned the other 6 billion, and a majority vote is needed to appoint a new CEO, how much is your one vote worth then?
To put it another way, you owned 1% of a company, and the company’s total assets were worth $100 (we’ll ignore the future for the moment), what is your 1% stake worth? $1 of course, because that’s what I would pay you and the other 99 guys who also have 1% of the shares each, because after I have all the shares, I can then liquidate the company’s assets and get exactly $100. Of course, that’s not really what happens in real life, but if you’re looking for some underlying value of your shares, there it is.
I suppose using your words, you don’t have any control over the company’s actions any more than you do over the president of the United States.
Polarius, there are ways someone can make money from a stock without selling it or receiving dividends. I’ve mentioned them already–buyouts, liquidation, purchase of controlling shares. These are rare and beyond the reach of small investors like you and me, but they are real possibilities that effect the market. The keep the actual value of a company from being completely unrelated to stock price, like sunspots. It is because these things are rare, however, that there is so much irrationality and fluctuation in the market. It isn’t completely rational, but it isn’t completely irrational either.
While I’m here, I’ll address the zero-sum argument, as well. I don’t think there is any guarantee that every company currently existing will eventually lose value equal to the value it has accumulated. Companies get absorbed and spun off all the time–not every company ends it existence being delisted. Some companies lose value, but as long as the economy grows (as long as the amount of goods and services in the world increases) the total value of all companies increases as well.
Now, sure, eventually, the entropy of the universe will approach its maximum and the universe will end in heat-death. Any stocks still in existence at that point will of course lose all their value for their holders. But if humanity dies cataclysmically, the last people holding stocks when the bombs go off won’t be around to see the market collapse, so it will hard to say that they lost exactly. (In a financial sense, I mean.)
In reality, I expect (and hope) that technology leading to free energy and the ability to control matter will result in an economy of abundance before that happens. If so, it is true that stock holders won’t, in the end, necessarily benefit more than non-investors, but again, it will be hard to say that anyone lost in that situation.
I think you are missing the accounting concepts of an asset/liability versus a revenue/loss.
An asset is ownership in something that generates wealth. Your house has an inherent value even if you never sell it. You can borrow against it. Same thing with a stock.