In the short term the stock market is a voting machine, being vulnerable to fashions and fads. In the long term it's a weighing machine that evaluates the actual earnings of the company. That was true in 1934 when Graham&Dodd penned it down in "Security Analysis" and it's still true today. Just look at what happened when WeWork tried to go public. It's just that "short" term in the stock market can be a decade or longer.
Yeah ultimately you always have the option of treating a stock as what it actually is (a stream of dividends), and the more random prices get, the more people will do that (because more dividend streams will be priced below NPV)
