Invested: The Rule #1 Investing Podcast

A stock split is when a company decides to exchange more shares at a lower price for stockholders' existing shares. They happen from time to time, so it's important for us as investors to understand what that means. Stock splits make stocks more accessible to individual shareholders, make selling put options cheaper, and typically tends to increase share prices in the short run. So does a stock split impact your investment if you already own the stock? It shouldn’t, because your investment should be the value of the entire business no matter how many pieces it is split into.    There's another kind of stock split which is called a reverse stock split, where you end up with less shares than you previously started with. For instance, let's say you had 100 shares and they reverse split it 10 to 1, you suddenly have 10 shares. Does it increase the value or decrease the value? Not at all.    Rule #1 investors look at the company not per share. They look at it as a whole company the way an owner does. This is why