Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input.

What governs the shape of price history graphs?
Let me see if I can restate your question: are speculative investments more volatile (subject to greater spikes and drops in pricing) than are more long-term investments which are defined by the predictability of their dividend returns? The short answer is: yes.  However, where it gets complicated is in deciding whether something is a speculative investment. Take your example of housing.  People who buy a house as an investment either choose to rent it out (so receive "rent" as "dividend") or live in it (foregoing dividends).  Either way, the scale of the investment is large and this is often the only direct investment that people manage themselves.  For this reason houses are bound up in the sentimental value people attach to a home, the difficulty of uprooting and moving elsewhere in search of cheaper housing or better employment, or the sunk cost of debt that can't be recovered by a fire-sale.  Such inertia can lead to sudden sell-offs as critical inflection points are reached (such as hoped-for economic improvements fail to materialise and cash needs become critical). At different levels that is true of just about every investment. Driving price-volatility is the ease of sale and the trade-offs involved.  A share that offers regular and dependable dividends, even if its absolute value falls, is going to be hung on to more frequently than those shares that suffer a similar decline but only offer a capital gain.  For the latter, the race is on to sell before the drop neutralises any remaining capital gain the investor may have experienced. A house with a good tenant or a share with stable dividends will be kept in preference for the quick cash-return of selling an asset that offers no such ongoing returns. This would result, visually, in more eratic curves for "speculative" shares while more stable shares are characterised by periods of stability interspersed with moments of mania. But I have to take your query further, since you provide graphical evidence to support your thesis.  Your charts combine varying time-scales, different sample rates and different scales (one of which is even a log scale).  It becomes impossible to draw any sort of meaningful micro-comparison unless they're all presented using exactly the same criteria.