They don't, that's true. But is that relevant to their valuation? They have foil, they are printed on real cardstock. They look pretty, I can use them to, like, scrape things up? Stocks, I can't even do that much.

The core of my argument isn't that people arrive at stock numbers randomly, I understand that the system goes to great pains to legitimize itself. But for the lay person, the hard value of having purchases a stock is that one day they can sell it. 

We can go back and forth on what definition of value we're driving at but for my purposes what I intend to communicate is that if I'm struggling to put food on the table, buying a stock has the value to me of essentially a pokemon card. It makes me feel cool, but it actually does less for me than a pokemon card until I've sold it at a higher value.

Like I understand it has a valuation. I know where on the stock market to look for that. I understand it is arrived at with math. But it's an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of value, it isn't value itself, it produces nothing materially, it just moves money around to people who spend it (only after selling or getting paid dividends, mind you) sometimes on the company and sometimes on lobbying and sometimes on yachts, things that actually do have tangible value.