Subject: Re: I’m Trimming - Filed @472
I'm not sure I follow. There must be a significant portion of people buying and selling shares who haven't attempted to value the future discounted cash flows but for example are trading based on trend or charts?

Its important to distinguish between the future cash flows of the business and the future cashflows of the stock.

For the business, it is quite a calculation to figure business value, involving predicting future sales and future prices of both inputs and outputs to the business and blah blah blah, plus knowing how to do interest rates as exponentials.

But all you NEED to care about for tradking stock is the future cash flows of the stock you are thinking of buying. For this, all you have to estimate is what the minimum price of the stock will be when you plan on selling it.

This can be as simple as: "I think tomorrow its going to sell for more than it is selling today" or "Sometime in the next Three years from now I think it will be trading at 2x its current price, and I'll sell it then."

The cash flows for a share of stock are
The price you sell the share at PLUS the dividends you received while you owned the share
MINUS the price you bought the share for.

And it is not a stretch, I think, to say that everybody buying a share today thinks they will sell it at a higher price sometime in the future. That is, they are all doing the cash flow estimation needed to make the purchase.

R:)