It seems like price discovery and liquidity are seen as undeniable good, but I've always been skeptical. Price discovery tends to be awkward for some instituti

It seems like price discovery and liquidity are seen as undeniable good, but I've always been skeptical. Price discovery tends to be awkward for some institutions, because we're not great at pricing future value and resiliency. I've always blamed the "price discovery" mentality for the breakdown of the conglomerate model in the US markets-- people don't want a GE or a Honeywell (or a Samsung), they want to buy the one unit that makes money TODAY, neglecting that the other units may be providing buffering for different economic conditions, or allow the bankroll of moonshot R&D that won't fit nicely on a single quarter's balance sheet. So now we've driven GE's stock price to near zero (note: this is why I should not have taken stock advice from my Mom) and finally split the company into a bunch of shards that can be independently price-discovered. Infinite liquidity seems to create a market with a significant amount of noise, and I'm not sure the noise has value here. The practical price may be $5, but you'll end up with a million back and forth trades chasing when it hits $4.99 or $5.01. The long term consensus got the price to $5, but HFT/infinite liquidity adds the noise. Maybe they got it to $5 faster, but I'm not sure even there. These are not actually investing in the business as a business, expecting the shares to go to $1 or $10, they're investing in it as a horserace, a psuedo-random event that lasts a couple of minutes they can handicap and hopefully pull a return from reliability. Dothey make meaningful contributions to corporate governance, when they hold the shares for less time than it would take to load the proxy voting website?