That’s a very postmodernist framing… the difference is that some narratives are better models of reality than others. I agree that earnings reports are so stage-managed as to be almost completely devoid of real information content, but what if you had unrestricted access to the company’s books? What if you could look into their sales database? Equities are a fairly standardized legal claim to quantifiable value, and this may not seem to factor into the market price much nowadays, but it is a qualitatively different kind of narrative than “sentiment”.