Huh? How do dividends depend on “stock to go up up up”? That’s opposite of my experience. How does EPS have anything to do with stock price? I think you have it all backwards.
Stock PICKing is speculative because we can’t predict the future. But that doesn’t mean that the future is unhinged from underlying fundamentals.
At the end of the day all stock market returns come from one's of 3 things:
Dividends
Earnings per Share growth
Multiple expansion
Over the long run the speculation that you so decry ( which amounts to Multiple expansion) has a negligible impact (less than 1%).
Sure you have plenty of short term booms and busts, but over the long term they are really irrelevant.