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Device Protects Day Traders From Emotional Trading
Philips Electronics, a Netherlands-based company, has come up with a device designed to protect day traders from emotionally based trading decisions. The Rationalizer measures your galvanic skin response and lets you know when you are under stress. An online trader can then take a "time-out, wind down and re-consider their actions," according to the company. This may have come too late for us, but at least future generations won't have to live through the horror of angry day trading.
Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years. All a stock is today is a percentage of the company, for instance if there are 500m shares of Microsoft and you own a share, you own 1/500,000,000 of Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, it would be better if it were the way you describe it, the way it was. The dissociation of dividends from share value is in my opinion everything that is wrong with the markets today. It used to be that steady, reliable profits, year after year, providing dividends to the shareholders was enough.
Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term. These days, half of the stock profits taken by investors of a company's entire lifespan, if any, are received in the IPO stage, at the very beginning. Stock trading is gambling, nothing more.