So Apple reported earnings Wednesday afternoon and by the time the market closed Thursday the stock had jumped something like 8%, closing somewhere north of $560 a share. I've been refreshing Yahoo Finance like an idiot for two days now, which tells you something about how I spend my Friday mornings.
Here's the thing that actually got me though, and it's not the earnings beat (43.7 million iPhones sold last quarter, which is a genuinely absurd number when you sit and think about it for more than five seconds). It's the 7-for-1 stock split. Starting June 2nd, anyone holding one share of AAPL gets seven. A stock that's been sitting up around $525-540 becomes a stock trading somewhere in the mid-$70s to $80s overnight, at least on paper.
I've wanted to own a piece of Apple since I was in college. Never did it, because $500-something a share always felt like some other tax bracket's hobby. You buy Ford or GE or something boring with dividends because thats what "normal" stock ownership looks like when you've got a couple hundred bucks lying around, not a five-figure brokerage account. So yeah, I'm a little embarrassed to admit the split is the thing that finally makes we want to open an E*Trade account, not the earnings call, not the buyback increase (they bumped it to $90 billion, up from $60 billion, which is such an insane sentence to type out loud). Its the price tag getting cut to something I can actually justify putting real money into.
My buddy Dave has owned Apple stock since like 2009 and he will not shut up about it. Every single time Apple does anything, announces a phone, misses an estimate by a rounding error, sneezes, I get a text from Dave with a screenshot of his portfolio. He sent one Thursday night that just said "told you." I didn't respond because there's nothing to say to that man that he hasn't already said to himself in the mirror.
Anyway. The split doesn't change what the company's actually worth, obviously — same market cap, just sliced into more pieces, like cutting a pizza into 12 slices instead of 8. Doesn't make more pizza. But there's something almost psychological about a lower per-share number that gets regular people in the door, and I think Apple knows exactly what they're doing here. Companies split stock when they want more retail investors buying in instead of just institutions and hedge funds, and Apple hasn't split since 2005 (a 2-for-1 back then, when the stock was worth a fraction of what it is now).
They also raised the dividend by about 8%, which barely registers next to the split headline but is honestly the more interesting long-term signal if you ask me. Apple paying a real, growing dividend still feels weird to type. This is the same company that spent a decade sitting on a pile of cash refusing to give any of it back to shareholders because Steve Jobs didn't believe in dividends. Now they're basically acting like a mature blue-chip utility company that happens to also make the phone in your pocket.
I still haven't reset all my passwords from the Heartbleed thing a couple weeks back, if I'm being honest, and I know I should before I go opening any new brokerage accounts. One disaster at a time I guess.
None of this is investment advice, to be clear — I'm a guy with a blog, not a financial advisor, and if you take stock tips from a post that also mentions I don't know how to properly manage my own passwords, that's on you. But June 2nd I'll probably actually buy a few shares for the first time in my life, and part of me is a little annoyed it took a marketing-adjacent stock split to get me off the fence when the fundamentals were sitting right there the whole time. Dave's going to be insufferable about this.