Effect On Historical Charts
When a stock splits, many charts show it similarly to a dividend payout and therefore do not show a dramatic dip in price. Taking the same example as above, a company with 100 shares of stock priced at $50 per share. The company splits its stock 2-for-1. There are now 200 shares of stock and each shareholder holds twice as many shares.
The price of each share is adjusted to $25. Based on this example you might expect to see the stock dropping from $50 to $25.
So what is done is something called adjusted close price. This adjusted close price will take all the closing prices before the split and divide them by the split ratio. So when you look at the charts it will seem as if the price was always $25. Both the Yahoo! historical price charts and the Google historical price charts show the adjusted close prices.
Read more about this topic: Stock Split
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