"because a 'stock' no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules."

This is taken from an enormous (19,000-word), highly recommended post by Ed Zitron. There is much here that merits comment, but I wanted to single out this section, and in particular the quote in the title, because it reflects a shift I've observed in my lifetime in the way people think about stocks and investments.  

Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in. When Oracle announced its $300 billion deal with OpenAI in September — one that Oracle does not have the capacity to fill and OpenAI does not have the money to pay for – analysts heaved and stammered like horny teenagers seeing their first boob:

John DiFucci from Guggenheim Securities said he was “blown away.” TD Cowen’s Derrick Wood called it a “momentous quarter.” And Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, “We’re all kind of in shock, in a very good way.”

“There’s no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up,” Zelnick said on the earnings call.

These are the same people that retail and institutional investors rely upon for advice on what stocks to buy, all acting with the disregard for the truth that comes from years of never facing a consequence. Three months later, and Oracle has lost basically all of the stock bump it saw from the OpenAI deal, meaning that any retail investor that YOLO’d into the trade because, say, analysts from major institutions said it was a good idea and news outlets acted like this deal was real, already got their ass kicked. 

And please, spare me the “oh they shouldn’t trade off of analysts” bullshit. That’s the kind of victim-blaming that allows these revered fuckwits to continue farting out these meaningless calls.

In reality, we’re in an era of naked, blatant, shameless stock manipulation, both privately and publicly, because a “stock” no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules. Perhaps you’re able to occasionally catch the house showing its hand, and perhaps the house meant for you to see it. Either way, you are always behind, because the people responsible for buying and selling stocks at scale under the auspices of “knowing what’s going on” don’t seem to know what they’re talking about, or don’t care to find out.

 
Obviously, there will be exceptions to the following, but in general, when I was a kid, people thought of stocks primarily as owning a small part of a business, mainly so that you could share in the profits in the form of dividends while hopefully seeing the stock price at the very least outpace inflation. Later on, we got growth companies like Walmart, Apple, and Amazon, which didn't pay dividends, but that was okay because they were taking those profits and investing them back into the companies on things like infrastructure and research and development. We might not be getting quarterly checks, but the companies we partially owned were becoming more efficient and offering better products and more market share.

In the 21st century, however, especially with the rise of the meme stock, the fundamental sense of ownership seems to have largely gone away. You buy because “number go up.”

Sure, we have grandiose narratives, outrageous promises, and financial analysts and journalists cranking out a great sea of numbers, but I think those are mainly just feeding the Keynesian beauty contest taken to its absurd limits. I'm sure that some trusting souls actually believed in Zuckerberg's metaverse and Marc Andreessen's Web3, and today believe in Elon Musk's robot utopia, but I suspect most investors only believe that other people will believe them.

And, yes, I know this makes me sound like just another grumpy old man, but I do not believe this will end well.