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What makes a company valuable?
A share is a claim on a company's future cash flows. Everything else in a stock price is really a debate about how much that future is worth today.
Owning a share means owning a legal claim on a slice of a company's future profits. So a stock's value ultimately reduces to two questions: how much cash will this business generate going forward, and how much is that future cash worth in today's terms?
The second question is where interest rates matter enormously — future cash flows are worth less today when rates are higher, which is why growth stocks (whose profits are expected further in the future) tend to be more sensitive to rate expectations than mature, cash-generative ones.
Management quality, competitive position, and product strength all matter because they change the market's confidence in that future cash flow actually arriving as expected, not because they have some separate source of value on their own.
See it in the data
The general productive-capacity trust model, plus Apple's live market conditions underneath it.
See the Stocks trust profileRelated