On the NY Stock Exchange there are 3,066 companies listed. All of those shareholders who did not trade their shares lost money only on paper, not in reality. What this shows is that there is a difference between cash and value. These things all have value. In order to transfer ownership, we use cash to represent the value.
Cash is the universal representation of value.
If we didn't have cash, we would have to exchange objects of equal value whenever we wanted to buy something. That's called bartering , and it's generally inconvenient. As a society we agree to use the limited quantity of cash as a universal object of value in our transactions because it makes transactions a lot easier. For more information on stocks and the stock market, see How Stocks Work . Inc. All rights reserved.