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As the percentage of the firm you own goes down and/or the dividend rate goes down, the Bitt number increases.

And my point is that when the dividend rate reaches zero, the Bitt number becomes infinite. What you've defined is essentially a risk ratio. And I fail to see the benefit where the dividend rate reaches zero. From my point of view, you're paying money that you will never see any return on. I can see, empirically, that there is such a significant number of other people who want these things, but I fail to see what their desire is based on. And part of me would feel guilty for pawning this crap off on someone else. To me, it's like selling something broken on eBay.

I guess it all comes down to control. There is a certain group of people who think that control of a company is worth paying for, and the stock market is based on that. Since that desire for control is aberrant to me, it seems like a huge waste of time.

And, to be clear, I completely understand the risk abatement idea in the original notion of stock, like what Julf describes with the Dutch East India Company. No single person can afford to lose $1,000,000, but a thousand people can afford to lose $1,000. So you get a thousand people to sign up and they hope that the expedition brings back more than $1,000,000, each of whom get their 0.1% of the profits. Effectively, that's dividends, and, again, from my point of view, dividends are largely not paid these days.
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Bitt Faulk