At any given point in time, it's possible to calculate how much value a stock has already given to its bearer via dividends, and adjust those values for the changing purchasing power over of currency over time.

Once a company dissolves, we have enough information to do this calculation over the entire lifetime of the stock issue. At that point, we can determine what real value that stock had at any point in the past for the bearer.

This explains how value investors interpret stock value, but most traders are speculators that expect to make their profit by selling the shares on to someone else. They will only buy a share of stock if they believe that a future investor will buy it off of them at a higher price. This future investor will either be a value investor that expects to get the dividend returns or another speculator that is making the same calculation. Thus, even if a share of stock will pass through many hands before it lands in the portfolio of a value investor, that value investor is the only real price anchor, and the entire chain of speculators are ultimately trying to sell to him/her.