This is very close to viewing the stock market as a zero-sum game, or the "baseball card" analogy which was spread around a few years ago. This is a fallacy; stocks do not derive their value from how popular investors find them. Rather, the correlation is in the opposite direction.
When you're buying a stock, you are actually buying part of a company...and assuming a reasonable stock structure and corporate governance, being on equal footing with all the other owners of the company.
These business owners, dividend or not, want to maximize the return they get from the business. Whether the company pays a dividend or not doesn't factor into the equation - part of the company's balance belongs to you, regardless of whether the board decides pay it out in a given year or not. If the board does not follow the interests of the shareholders, a shareholder lawsuits or board changes will result.
Pre-dividend/stock buyback Apple is an excellent example of this, although examples this dramatic and obvious aren't common. The stock price was increasing steadily in lockstep with the company's balance sheet until the board decided they couldn't use the money for anything useful and decided to pay it out to the shareholders.
[Edit: Actually, share prices in the funds I own are historically low relative to common measures of company valuation, price/earnings or price/book value. Earnings to market cap for these companies are something around 8% on average. So either stocks are historically cheap, or earnings are about to drop by more than a factor of 50%. Seems like a better bet than a negative-real return bank account to me].
When you're buying a stock, you are actually buying part of a company...and assuming a reasonable stock structure and corporate governance, being on equal footing with all the other owners of the company.
These business owners, dividend or not, want to maximize the return they get from the business. Whether the company pays a dividend or not doesn't factor into the equation - part of the company's balance belongs to you, regardless of whether the board decides pay it out in a given year or not. If the board does not follow the interests of the shareholders, a shareholder lawsuits or board changes will result.
Pre-dividend/stock buyback Apple is an excellent example of this, although examples this dramatic and obvious aren't common. The stock price was increasing steadily in lockstep with the company's balance sheet until the board decided they couldn't use the money for anything useful and decided to pay it out to the shareholders.
[Edit: Actually, share prices in the funds I own are historically low relative to common measures of company valuation, price/earnings or price/book value. Earnings to market cap for these companies are something around 8% on average. So either stocks are historically cheap, or earnings are about to drop by more than a factor of 50%. Seems like a better bet than a negative-real return bank account to me].