Will Goldman Sachs Finally Split Its Stock?
Stock splits don't have any fundamental impact on a company, but they can still signal optimism about the future of a business and its prospects for further gains. Yet despite its status on Wall Street as a key player in the investment banking world, Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) has never done a stock split. Given that splitting shares has become less common throughout the market, there's a reasonable argument that Goldman might never choose to do one. Yet in part because of its position in the Dow Jones Industrials (DJINDICES: ^DJI), it's possible that with the stock at current levels, the investment banking giant might pull the trigger on a split after all.
Because Goldman has never split its shares, we can't look back at its history to see when it tends to consider such decisions. Instead, all we can do is look at situations in which the company hasn't done a split and make whatever inferences we can from that behavior.
It didn't take long for Goldman Sachs to get to a point at which many companies would have considered a stock split. After going public at $53 per share in 1999, Goldman shares moved into triple digits within the first year of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Yet as it turned out, that move marked the end of a long bull market in stocks that had run throughout most of the 1990s, and the ensuing slide over the next couple of years brought Goldman shares down to more manageable prices.
Source: Fool.com
