This was a really helpful explanation, thank you! I have really minimal experience in finance and economics (other than keeping savings and blindly dumping mone

This was a really helpful explanation, thank you! I have really minimal experience in finance and economics (other than keeping savings and blindly dumping money into index funds). I really appreciate you for taking the time to respond! So really when you get down do it, you're paying for the prospect that the company will eventually be able to do something that will return money/value to you, but you don't know what. And so when you're buying shares, you're analyzing the risk between them going broke, and the value that they could potentially pay out someday. Same as private equity, but with a less clear path to actually extracting value from the company. Then if the company was really screwed up, the shareholders could technically vote on a way to turn the company's assets into cash, which they would get a portion of. Or do anything else with, since the shareholders get to vote on the outcomes of those things.