No you don't.
Imagine a company that has a share price of 100$. And this company makes 10$ in profit, per share, and returns that 10$ in profits to shareholders every year in perpetuity.
Thats a 10% rate of return that investors would be happy to accept in perpetuity.
People accept this deal all the time. Usually they are called "bonds" or "loans", and they act as merely an a perpetuity cash payout.
It isn't, because it's not compound interest (exponential growth), which is what everyone is after--and needs, to beat inflation. It's a fixed revenue stream. To make it compound, one would have to reinvest the return in this stock or something else, and reinvesting in this stock would increase its demand, which pushes its price up, and then we're off to the races again.
The whole system is mathematically unstable. It's only survived this long due to slow(ish) growth, but it keeps experiencing repeated price shocks, crashes, currency rebases, debt defaults, and finally issuing new currencies (which, btw, is why everyone is going nuts over crypto currencies). It can last quite some time--perhaps a couple generations--when the exponents are very low (read: < 3%), but when the exponents are high (i.e. companies shooting for > 10% growth), this thing is going off the rails. Welcome to the show!
There's quite literally a word for low growth but reliable stocks that pay out decent dividends. "Value stocks", as opposed to "Growth stocks" where investors expect to see the returns directly in the stock price.
Why not? If it's somewhat reliable (in the long run, averaged out), that's a ROI of 2.5%, which is not too bad I think.
