The First Conversation

Strictly speaking, no publicly listed company could ever be one hundred percent free of problems.

The purpose of a company going public was not to prove some great ideal or philosophy to society. Put bluntly, it was to take money from retail investors' pockets.

The shares of a listed company were divided into two parts. One part consisted of the shareholders' shares, which were held by major and minor shareholders and were not easily traded.

The other part consisted of the tradable shares issued when the company went public. These shares were held in stock-market accounts, changed hands frequently, and ultimately determined the company's market share price.

No matter what those capitalists and listed companies claimed—no matter how they said buying stocks was a form of investment—in the end, they were simply trying to make people believe one thing: buying their stocks could make money.

The more popular a stock was, the higher its price became, the higher the company's market capitalization rose, and the more valuable the shares held by its shareholders became.

That was why most listed companies chose to raise their share prices as their primary means of making profits after going public. It was far faster than actually earning money.

A listed company might struggle for an entire year and earn only a few million in net profit. But if it raised its share price by just a little—five or ten percent—its market capitalization would grow by more than the net profit it had worked so hard to earn that year.

That was also the main reason funds preferred flowing into finance in modern society. Investors could avoid long-term operations and reap vast fortunes, though of course they could also be reaped themselves.

So how did one make a stock popular? It was actually very simple: