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Originally Posted by coralway
Very much like the concept of splitting to bring new, and presumably younger, investors into the market and increase liquidity. As a kid back in 1986, I was walking past a Computer Factory store one day in NYC and in the window seeing a little machine there playing a game of ping. Thought it was pretty cool, had never seen anything like it. I had seen an IBM machine that ran DOS, the firm I worked for was buying them and putting one in our offices. But, I was kinda liking this little machine I saw in the window at Computer Factory playing games. So, I walked in, and a little while later walked out with an Apple IIe, disk drive, cable and monitor. On a whim, a few days later I logged onto my Fidelity Brokerage account and purchased 200 shares of Apple stock, at a price of $2.86 a share. The entire investment cost me $578.95. The stock split in 1987, 2000, 2005, 2014, and 2020. I have never sold a single share and, needless to say, it has been very good to me. The splits lowered the price per share, but brought more buyers into the market, that drove up the price again. Nowadays, you can buy fractional shares of a security, a feature not available just a few years ago. Again, it increases market liquidity, and that's the point.
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Your Apple story warmed my heart. Thank you for it. Peter Lynch of Fidelity bought into some trendy stocks his daughters "discovered" by shopping their stores and buying their products. He did well by them.
My lucky buy was a few shares of Berkshire Hathaway in the mid to late 1980s at about $3,000/share, now BRK-A shares, way before B shares were issued. Berkshire comprises about a third of my portfolio. Apple is now Berkshire's largest holding. Ironically I bought Apple for the first time ever a few years ago, not long before it split. I wish I had bought more! lol
My father was trading the "nifty fifty" back in the day. I remember him calling his broker from the our home early in the morning in NM, two hours behind east coast time. The first stock I ever bought was Colt Industries. I held it for a only short while. Stocks were never of great interest to me and I got into real estate investing, on the side buying various securities over time but not in sizable quantities as a way to park some of my cash reserves. My greatest goof was getting caught up in what amounted to fraud, commodity options.
Goldstein, Samuelson, Inc - Wikipedia. I briefly traded commodities and broke even on it all but found it was too stressful.