Stock Split Mania: Congratulations, You Own Cheaper Shares of the Same Overpriced Thing

Let me save you the suspense: stock splits are accounting theater. A company slices its share into smaller pieces. Your fractional ownership doesn’t change. Your claim on earnings doesn’t change. The only thing that changed is the number in your brokerage account, which now reads “80 shares at $12.50” instead of “8 shares at $125.” Congratulations on your splintered pie.

Yet here we are, with Wall Street breathlessly reporting that “investors gravitating toward premier stock-split stocks” have helped lift the market to new heights. Sure they have—and investors gravitating toward anything during a bull market technically lift it. Correlation isn’t a strategy, but try telling that to a financial media complex that needs a headline every 90 seconds.

The one kernel of