That's true but misses an important factor: competition from other assets. The cash flow stream from most tech companies usually looks like 5 years of large ca

That's true but misses an important factor: competition from other assets. The cash flow stream from most tech companies usually looks like 5 years of large cash infusions (often from VCs); a decade or two of zero cash spun off as the company reinvests all profits in growth; and then a few years to a decade of massive cash being spun off for investors. For a historical example, see Apple - didn't pay a dividend for about 15 years from Steve Jobs's return until 2012, and now regularly returns tens of billions to investors in buybacks. For a current example, see Salesforce, which makes effectively zero GAAP profit but is growing massively as they reinvest that into product development and sales. If competing investments - say Treasuries - are yielding zero now, there's no reason why you wouldn't buy Salesforce stock now and lock in those future dividends even though they're 15 years off. But if the 10-year Treasury is going to go up to 15% in 2 years - why wouldn't you sell your Salesforce stock when rates go up, buy a 10-year Treasury, quadruple your money over those 10 years, then buy 4x as much Salesforce stock right before they actually start spinning off cash as a dividend? The 1970s actually looked like this. There was a big stock run-up in the late 60s, and then a very large stock market crash (~50%) in 1973 when the Fed started raising interest rates to combat inflation. Stocks continued to trade sideways during the high-inflation, high-interest period of the 1970s, and then they really took off in the late 80s once inflation was under control and rates started dropping.