It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
> It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have XY dollars worth of stock
Sure, but the "market" price of stock isn't really the value of every* share, its roughly the marginal price of the last/next share purchased or sold, but the more you want to trade, the farther from the market price the value will be.
And changes to the market clearing price don't tell you about changes to the supply and demand curves, just where they intersect. So, for any but a small quantity of stock, you can't tell what the real change in the realizable value of your holdings is just from the change in the market price, since there's no guarantee that a change of $1 in market price equates to a change of $1/share in the price you'll get if you try to sell a particular quantity of a stock.
We tend to ignore that when placing a valuation on a portfolio because if you don't ignore it, you can't get a valuation. But those valuations are approximations, at best.
I think I remember that happening to Google at least once. There are expectations and "expectations". Analysts' published expectations are often different than the ones they believe privately, and the expectation might be to exceed the "expectation".
Beating published analyst expectations isn't the same as beating the actual expectations of investors. One might reasonably expect the actual market expectations to be loosely correlated with analyst's published expectations, and they probably are, but its probably only loosely correlated.
