>Management is pressured to take extraordinary actions just to mitigate the market situation (stock splits/reverse-splits, stock buy-backs, accounting tricks, etc), employees freak out and quit, long-term investors get nervous, potentially fruitful M&As fail to happen, etc.
Oh please, if anything accounting tricks are more likely to be prevalent in a fundamentally traded market. When your company is traded solely upon earnings, you don't think you'd have more motivation to toy with those earnings numbers?
>As for the societal cost, technical trading educates and perpetuates the myth that the stock market is a big gambling house, and not a means to become an owner of a company. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, every time you think about buying stock you should think of it the same way as if you were buying a mom-and-pop shop, like a pizza place. Is the price you're paying roughly equivalent to - or better than - how much you'd expect to make by pocketing the profits of the shop over the lifetime of the business?
What is this? Some kind of argument from the moral high ground? The people who treat the stock market as a gambling opportunity will quickly be liquidated, and I can't imagine why one should feel sorry for them.