What I mean is that investors don't want to pony up the cash at current market prices. They want a discount. Then they will pony up the cash

Just like creditors demand higher rates on investment grade bonds, investors are demanding a higher risk premium if they're going to be expected to keep piling in cash to this particular sector that's diluting and raising.

But how can you quantify that? There is no way to prove it, the market cannot say "I wasn't moved by this, I was actually moved by that and this part was actually just negligible."

Isn't it all subjective in the end because nobody really makes their trades with verifiable notes expressing the exact reason. So we can only guess right?

Heh. I would not discount narrative so fast. You may not believe it, but it does not mean others don't.

Yep. Job numbers are the “actual economy” – the actual economy is driven by wages and consumption.

Stronger wages → stronger consumption → higher demand-pull inflation.

But higher inflation implying that “rates should go up” is central bank doctrine. It’s not a general law of how economies function.

Central banks intervening with interest rate adjustments is what distorts the prices of equities downward, when inflation rises.

Without central bank intervention, inflation should theoretically push equities higher (a highly-inflated economy driven by rising demand is by definition a well-performing economy!).

Central banks intervene because runaway inflation can be harmful to wage-earners (they save in dollars, not assets).

But I’m not sure if a 2–3% inflation target is ideal. It seems to me that this arbitrarily low inflation target restricts the growth of the economy in ways that might affect wage-earners, defeating the stated purpose of monetary policy, since higher rates also have the effect of curbing job growth as well as raising the cost of servicing mortgages.

> Only dividend stocks have some base value connected to how well the company does.

That's not how it works. If the company has profits they can distribute it in many ways. Dividends is one, but not a great one because it forces you to pay taxes on it this year. Or they can buy back shares which increases the share price, which is better because then you don't have taxable income on that until you decide to sell. Or they can reinvest that money into the business to grow it, which is the ideal option, although not always possible.

They do have intrinsic value!

Growth stocks trade on a multiple of earnings: earnings have intrinsic value.

> Non dividend stocks only have value because other people think they have value (i.e. greater fool theory)

Alphabet buys back shares equal to the GDP of Uganda every year. There are more ways to return capital than through dividends.

Every time I try to explain this to people I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. Even more frustrating to hear, otherwise reasonable, market analysts say that "dividends don't matter because the stock value goes down on payout". What doesn't matter is how successful a company is if they don't share their profits. You're literally buying a Pokémon card just with a lot of liquidity until the illusion of value bursts, hoping that somebody will buy you out because P/E improves or whatever.

This take makes sense but isn't really accurate. A lot of companies have stock buy back programs in lieu of dividends; essentially, using their cash flow to manipulate their stock price instead of returning money to every investor. Now this doesn't guarantee a particular price usually, but does help push the price up when they are buying a significant amount from the market.