Somewhere?
How will he even know unless he has an iPhone* in his coffin?
* Assuming it was set correctly in his cold, dead hands.
There used to be a running joke – and perhaps one with more than a little truth to it – that one of the reasons the late Steve Jobs didn't split Apple's fast-rising stock was that he wanted to someday see it pass Google in per-share price. Had Apple's co-founder lived exactly six months longer, he would have seen that day come …
P/E ratio is the closest thing you get to a stupidity index. This is the ratio of stock price to profits earned. The normal range for this is 10-20. Above that tends to indicate overpriced stock (or optimistic buyers), below that indicates underpriced stock (or pessimistic buyers).
Guess what, Google's current P/E is 20.2, Apple's is 18. Who are the bigger idiots?
Isn't it comforting to know that the idiots that manage our pensions don't have anything else to do with our cash other than to decide to keep throwing it into Google and Apple stock that their buddies are selling them at a profit?
There was a time when BRK.B was stuck at $32,767.5 and wouldn't go up anymore for some "unknown" reason. At least money sent there is invested in companies and not just used to bet that a stock price will go up.
"stuck at 32,767.5"
Maybe they were only using a signed 16-bit integer to hold the dollar value, and the thought of it dropping to -32,768 in after-hours trading would be too horrifying to contemplate :)
(Joke alert, lest this descends into a discussion about BCD...)
The number of shares is perfectly arbitrary. They can not only split them to drop the per share value, they can also do a N-for-1 stock whatchamacallit to multiply the per share price up.
Aside from impressing the peasants and perhaps keeping out the riffraff, the per share price is a bit meaningless. It's daft to think it means anything unless and until it's multiplied by the number of shares.
They could just have one bigass $600B share, and then they could perhaps sell shares of the bigass share.
The high price of the stock certainly keeps most if not all of the high frequency traders out of the stock so I'll give them that. Granted, averaging 20M shares a day is a lot higher than GOOG at about 2.5M but it seems pretty low compared to real h.f. targets like BAC which is averaging close to 300M daily trades. I'm thinking the reason for the stock buyback is exactly to drive up the price so they can split and maintain a high price afterward to keep h.f. out of the game.
Not many people are going to buy and sell one share. They'd typically buy and sell groups of share. A "high" share price is a bit like a football (soccar) match in that it lacks the finely divided score resolution of a basketball game. But that matters not a bit.
The "volume" (number of shares traded) is equally meaningless unless and until it's multiplied by the value of the shares, thus calculating the actual "volume" in dollars.
Not an Economist (or particularly good at maths), but...
Could you imagine if Google, Apple & Microsoft got together? they'd destroy Hollywood, that would make me happy, and no, I'm not drunk, just bored and hating on Hollywood - also the fandroids and Appletards would all have to kiss and makeup.
iGooSoft running the world, yo... and Happy Easter all.
Oh that dream sounds nice, but it wouldn't really work like that given that Jobs was for all the ugly things we hate Hollywood for (inane copyright extensions, DRM, "IP protection", stupid patents) so it would be more like the Rise of the Empire.
Of course, Jobs is no more, Cook might just stray away from that nonsense. Time will tell..