Do not adjust your sets: despite finishing Friday at $645, Apple stock will open today at around $92. This is the result of a 7-to-1 stock split, which will see the price of stock divided by 7 and shareholders of record awarded 6 additional shares on top of their existing holdings.
Apple announced the split earlier this year in what we referred to at the time as an 'earth-shattering earnings call.'
For those keeping track, Apple's stock has split on three previous occasions: with 2-for-1 splits taking place in 1987, 2000 and 2005. While Apple has claimed that its aim is to make stock 'more accessible' to a wider range of customers, it's also possible that Apple is shooting for inclusion in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, which is price-weighted. Where Apple's previous stick price of close to $700 would have resulted in a significant re-weighting of the index, a price of $92 would place it in the right range for inclusion. This would allow Apple, the world's most valuable publicly traded company, to join the likes of A&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Verizon already on the index.
With Apple having gone public on December 12, 1980 for $22 per share, accounting for all stock splits in the company's history this would give a rough return of 23,400% over 33.5 years.
Apple's all-time high stock price was $705, reached in September 2012. That would translate to $100.72, post-split.
Luke Dormehl is a UK-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems, And Create More and The Apple Revolution, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme, and other publications. He'd like you a lot if you followed him on Twitter.
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