a lot of people buy stocks for the sole reason

to sell stocks higher to other people. You should think of buying stocks like buying a business, just that u do not have that much money, so you just buy part of business. If u think this way, the first thing you would think is the business can make you money, second thing is that if the business is cheap enough for you to take risk to buy the future cash flow brought by the business, third is that how business's future cash flow will change facing an ever developing world and discount the risk. Theoretically, stock price should be the last thing u need to worry about, since you can't control that. But if your business has good cash flow, its price would be high naturally in normal times.