Yep you've got it, it's a casino, shares are a bit of paper whose value is whatever some other person'll give for it. Enron's 'chain letter' scheme blew bigger than any other bubble in corporate history, it involved salesmanship and false accounting, in co-operation with Arthur Andersen (who were the US's most prestigous accountants) creating huge and costly power blackouts in California, politically destroying the incumbent governor and Democrat presidential hopeful Gray Davis, in order to forc find out more...