There is value in a non-dividend paying stock beyond the stock market itself: ideally, the market cap estimates the value of the company if it were to be acquired, and someone buys your shares from you. So it&#x27;s not simply stock market participants guessing about other stock market participants. There is an actual, valuable, buyable product being traded, namely the company itself; it just happens to be traded in the form of lots of tiny shares.<p>Whether the chance of an acquisition happening is sufficiently non-nil as to be worth caring about is a legitimate question. It&#x27;s not completely unheard of even for tech companies (cf. Dell), but it&#x27;s certainly not the norm.<p>Also, note that the stock market isn&#x27;t zero-sum: when the value of a stock goes up, wealth is created. Nothing goes down. If a company IPOs at $10&#x2F;share, I buy it at $12, and that share gets purchased for $14, nobody loses money. The original purchaser of the share made $2, I made $2, and the final owner now owns a product which the market thinks is worth paying $14 for. There may be another sense in which this activity is meaningless, but it&#x27;s not because it&#x27;s zero-sum.