31–40 of 105 posts
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
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/aapl/instituti...
I don’t really understand stock splits. Is the only point to allow people to buy shares who could previously not buy because one share was too expensive? If so, why not just introduce fractional shares into the stock market with some fixed point number of decimal places? Or just keep track of ownership fraction (e.g. 0.0043% of the company)?
"A company should be a thing, and people should be able to own a portion of its equity, and the portion that each person owned would be expressed as an arbitrarily precise percentage of the total...The “stock price” would be what we now call the “market cap”: The market would place a value of $X on the company as a whole, and if I wanted to buy another 0.01429% I would pay 0.01429% of $X....
The traditional, 19th-century answer to how many shares a company should have was that stocks should have a normal price, they should cost like $40 to $100...This was so standard that, when Charles Dow created a stock index in 1884, he just averaged the dollar stock prices of a bunch of stocks...because the stocks had normal prices.
There is an argument that high-priced stocks reduce liquidity because traders have less incentive to post quotes. It is good for a stock to trade at a bid/ask spread of a couple of “ticks,” the minimum price increment for trading. If a stock is worth $50 and trades at a bid/ask spread of $49.99/$50.01, a trader who posts a bid to buy at $49.99 will be able to buy from anyone who wants to sell immediately. If it’s worth $500 and trades at $499.90/$500.10, a trader who posts a bid to buy at $499.90 might lose out to a trader who bids $499.91. You can’t reliably earn a “normal” spread by trading the stock, so your incentive to provide liquidity is lower. Nasdaq published a paper arguing this point
At the time of Apple’s last split, in 2014, one popular explanation was that Apple was trying to get into the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is still price-weighted and so still has an old-fashioned fondness for normal-priced stocks, but that worked and now it’s in the Dow so that’s no reason to split again"
Does anybody else share my sort of shell-shock WRT Tesla? I'm one of those who thinks its stock (and probably all the big tech names) are in a bubble. But whenever I say that I get shouted down, downvoted, told I'm an idiot, etc. I'm hoping this comment is vanilla enough to be safe... just curious if others have had the same experience. To be clear: I'm not interested in debating the value of Tesla. I'm curious if ot…
I’m not short TSLA, FWIW.
Does anybody else share my sort of shell-shock WRT Tesla? I'm one of those who thinks its stock (and probably all the big tech names) are in a bubble. But whenever I say that I get shouted down, downvoted, told I'm an idiot, etc. I'm hoping this comment is vanilla enough to be safe... just curious if others have had the same experience. To be clear: I'm not interested in debating the value of Tesla. I'm curious if ot…
I agree with you I have no idea why it is valued the way it is. My original thought for getting on at the IPO was that since they were one of the first big electric car players, they would get a patent portfolio that would be worth a lot in the future even if they failed as a car manufacturer. Of course, that logic went out the window when Elon promised to license the patents freely to anyone who wanted to build electric cars a number of years ago.
I can understand people valuing TSLA at more than, say, Ford, because of their future prospects and because they aren't burdened with legacy issues like worker pensions, but it's hard to believe it should be worth 10x. It also isn't clear to me how TSLA went down ~10% over the past 5 days but is right back up there on news of the split.
Does anybody else share my sort of shell-shock WRT Tesla? I'm one of those who thinks its stock (and probably all the big tech names) are in a bubble. But whenever I say that I get shouted down, downvoted, told I'm an idiot, etc. I'm hoping this comment is vanilla enough to be safe... just curious if others have had the same experience. To be clear: I'm not interested in debating the value of Tesla. I'm curious if ot…
I wouldn't buy it at these levels (or even close to), but I wouldn't short it either.
(paraphrasing C.Munger)
Does anybody else share my sort of shell-shock WRT Tesla? I'm one of those who thinks its stock (and probably all the big tech names) are in a bubble. But whenever I say that I get shouted down, downvoted, told I'm an idiot, etc. I'm hoping this comment is vanilla enough to be safe... just curious if others have had the same experience. To be clear: I'm not interested in debating the value of Tesla. I'm curious if ot…
Does anybody else share my sort of shell-shock WRT Tesla? I'm one of those who thinks its stock (and probably all the big tech names) are in a bubble. But whenever I say that I get shouted down, downvoted, told I'm an idiot, etc. I'm hoping this comment is vanilla enough to be safe... just curious if others have had the same experience. To be clear: I'm not interested in debating the value of Tesla. I'm curious if ot…
You are not alone. Regular (non-tech) stock market analysts are comparing current valuations with the dot-com bubble. But there is no TINA ( https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tina-there-no-alternati... ). The money needs to go somewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing it can impact is derivatives trading. A standard option contract controls 100 shares, which can be quite a large amount of $ if each individual share is priced highly (likewise affects the effective granularity of the common option strike prices in the market) Update: For something like TSLA which may have some psychological "Bitcoin-like" speculation going on among retail investors, I suppose the big numbe…
Is there any reason beyond legacy that option contracts come in 100 share bundles?
From /u/ins2be on reddit:
"That's what the OCC sets it at in their bylaws.
Unit of Trading
(5) The term “unit of trading” in respect of any series of options or futures means the number of units of the underlying interest which have been designated by the Corporation as the minimum number to be the subject of a single option contract or single future in such series. In the absence of any such designation for a series of options or futures in which the underlying security is a common stock the unit of trading shall be 100 shares."
Does anybody else share my sort of shell-shock WRT Tesla? I'm one of those who thinks its stock (and probably all the big tech names) are in a bubble. But whenever I say that I get shouted down, downvoted, told I'm an idiot, etc. I'm hoping this comment is vanilla enough to be safe... just curious if others have had the same experience. To be clear: I'm not interested in debating the value of Tesla. I'm curious if ot…
If they can successfully enable fully automated self driving cars, then I think the value is entirely justified. See FaceBook. Disclaimer: I bought Tesla calls today and now assume I’m rich so your opinion may differ