Stock Splits Lose Their Allure for Companies Trading Above $100
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Priceline.com, Apple, and MasterCard would seem ideal candidates for a stock split. The latter two are trading at more than $500 per share, and online travel site Priceline is flirting with $1,000, making the inveterate dot-com-era survivor the most expensive stock in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
Yet splits have lost their allure to executives even amid a four-year-plus bull market that has sent the number of stocks trading above $100 to a record. Sixty-three companies in the S&P 500 are now above that threshold, twice the level in 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Just 10 have split their stock this year, compared with an average of 48 annually since 1980.