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Comment by gzu | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of splits, I love how Apple’s stock split justification is: “We want Apple stock to be more accessible to a broader base of investors.” https://investor.apple.com/faq/default.aspx

Yet it’s one of the top stocks held on Robinhood (#3 at 700,000 users)

https://www.robintrack.net/symbol/AAPL

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Apple is in the DOW and the DOW is a stupidly weighted index where share price affects what percentage of the index that company holds. Right now a 1% increase in Apple pushes the DOW up 10 times more than a 1% increase in Cocoa Cola.

Companies in the DOW tend to have share prices below $500/ share and most are under $200 and the DOW won't add companies with high stock values as a result (Apple was added only after their last split).

It's likely being in the DOW bolsters and stabilizes stock prices as a lot of indexes are based on a the DOW. It also brings a company a certain prestige.

Whether any of this affects the Apple board's decision to split the stock or not is entirely speculation... it just seems a far more likely reason than the idea that they are splitting to make it accessible to people with $500 they want to invest.

Very few people invest in the basket of companies that make up the Dow Jones. Its use as an index of how the stock market is behaving is really a historical artifact at this point. One ETF in the top one hundred [1] ETFs is based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and that one is ranked 43rd. Joining the S&P 500 is a big deal, on the other hand, as the three biggest ETFs are S&P 500 funds.

[1]https://etfdb.com/compare/market-cap/

Fair enough. Even so, I think inclusion/ exclusion in the DOW is far more likely to affect Apple's choice to split or not than making the stock more accessible to investors.

I doubt it, and I think there is a misunderstanding about the investors Apple referred to in their public statement on the split. As a company's share price rises the stock becomes less liquid, because trades happen in smaller quantities; Berkshire Hathaway's class A shares are probably the most extreme example. Low liquidity is a problem for mutual funds, which have to sell assets whenever an investors sells their shares in the fund (which may be a relatively small sale e.g. a retirement account distribution), because low liquidity makes asset sales more difficult. In general institutional investors will have liquidity rules that constrain the assets their funds can hold to avoid that kind of problem.

Given how much investment capital is held by institutional investors, companies have a good reason to split their shares if the share price is too high. Berkshire Hathaway created a new share class to support the needs of institutional investors, and I would read "accessible to investors" as "conforming to the liquidity requirements of institutional investors."

They have 4.2B shares outstanding with 64% being held by institutions. 700k people owning shares is a drop in the bucket.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/aapl/instituti...

Robinhood lets users buy fractional shares [1]. What's the average and median share holding per user?

1. https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/fractional-shar...

It's probably one of the top stocks held on any platform

“Accessibility” is always a bogus reason nowadays. Stock commissions are dirt cheap so there is little reason to buy in lot sizes anymore. If you have $320,000 in your account you can buy a single share of Berkshire Hathaway for less than a $10 commission.

Stock splits are just a low grade attempt to pump up the stock price.

Accessibility does not just refer to retail investors, it also refers to institutional investors who are constrained by liquidity rules; this is why Berkshire Hathaway created its class B shares.

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