Wall Street Splits a Stock, Calls It Revolutionary. It’s Just Arithmetic, Heroes.

Sliced bread. That’s the bar for AI hype, apparently. Meanwhile, the other crowd-pleaser lifting the market is… stock splits. Yes, stock splits. Companies dividing a pizza into more slices and Wall Street applauding the increased slice count as if the pizza got bigger.

Let’s do the math a first-semester engineering student could do: in a stock split, the share price divides by the split ratio and the share count multiplies by the same ratio. Market capitalization: unchanged. Your ownership stake: unchanged. Company fundamentals: unchanged. Zero. A calculator-free event celebrated as a market development.

So why does it move anything? Two mechanisms, both embarrassing. First, retail investors see a triple-digit stock price, assume “expensive,” and can’t operate a fractional-share purchase—despite every major broker offering them for