[The Fed can prop up stock values for a long long time.
The crash will come _eventually_, and when it does it will be epic.
What that means in the real world is that today’s stock market is a casino.
I prefer casinos—at least I know what the odds are...even if they are against me. ]
The key differences? Liquidity and protections. Trying to sell your share of a restaurant business is not an easy task for two reasons - valuing the business and finding a buyer. Buyers are scarce because it’s a very specialized type of purchase and usually involves a significant lump sum of cash involving tens of thousands, at minimum. Valuing the business is similarly difficult because the buyer has to trust the general partner to not work a finagle on him (i.e. by simply pocketing and not recording cash inflows) in a way he would not stick it to you because you are the partner’s kin.
Whereas with stocks, selling your shares is simply a matter of clicking on a web page, and can be done in seconds. And questions of self-dealing and fraud are mostly kept under control by the SEC and nationally-known auditors.
All shareholders in a small business are relying to a large extent on the general partner’s personal integrity. That is not the case with publicly-traded stocks, where regulatory watchdogs are on the job, however imperfectly. Criminal self-dealing and fraud with respect to publicly traded companies are punished with substantial prison terms. Prosecutors have no issue justifying the expenditure of large sums of money on these investigations because the sums involved are huge - typically in the tens of millions up to billions of dollars. Whereas a small business wrangle involving tens of thousands of dollars in misappropriated funds won’t get the prosecutor’s name in the headlines or make him famous enough to campaign for his next job (mayor, Congressman, governor, etc), meaning most such investors are out of luck.
You and I are not looking at the same stock market.
Just for starters—all trades are “front-run”.
That means the dealers/brokers get to look at the trade before they execute it, and profit as a result.
That is _worse_ than a casino.
The regulation of the markets is a total joke. It is a revolving door between the regulators and the industry, and the weak law enforcement is only exceeded by pathetic legislation that is always many years behind the latest Wall Street scam.
As to corporate financial statements, they are a tissue of lies if you actually read all the footnotes that negate the text. I have an MBA from one of those “fancy” schools, and I would not trust _any_ corporate balance sheets as far as I could throw them.
The corporations have created _huge_ incentives for senior management to lie, much greater than any risk of getting caught.
Add to that the basic fact that sociopaths rise to the top of large organizations, and you have a wacky “market” that should not be trusted by anyone.