There's no difference. Stocks split for two reasons: 1) Psychological; it makes the stock seem cheaper. 2) On rare occasions, the exchange will ask the company to do so (but the company does not have to comply. BRKA is an example.).
He's prolly full of shit. He said he bought 5000 shares @ $85, that means he invested $425,000 into Google. If he's telling the truth, he now owns $2,275,000.00 of stock, -$425,000 investment = $1,850,000 profit
I would've bought in but when it first came out (and me not working at the time) I didn't have the cash to put into it.... Oh wells, next time perhaps
I’ve been thinking about buying some shares but don’t know how to go about it. How can I buy shares online?
It seems that a lot of people have been wondering why shares splitting is so great when it's the same thing, so I thought that'd I'd explain it. Assume you have 10 shares of a stock at 10 bucks a share. That means you have $100.00 in stock. Now the stock splits. Now you have 20 shares of stock at 10 bucks a share. But since the stock split, it meant that it was doing pretty well. So, the stock begins to go up again. Now you get back to $10.00 a share. Now you have 20 shares at $10.00. Splitting gives you more stock that when it goes up, means you get more profit. Splitting of stock is a stock holder's dream. I'm just waiting for Intel to split if it ever does.
2:1 split would give you $5 a share. You need to realize that a split increases that numbers of shares outstanding. This means that when the company announces good earnings, the share price would not go up as far. Basically, it's a trade off; you get more shares but less capital gains. It's all psychological.
In response to the guy that can't keep track of his "5000 shares of Google". You invest that much in a company and you don't know how much you could get if you traded it in? It's not like you said "I can get 250000 if I traded it in" you said 1/4 a million. You didn't forget a zero. If you purchased at the opening price of $80 a share then you would have put up 400k. You didn't realize that you just said your stock was worth almost half of what you bought it for even though the stock is worth 5.75x more than it was when you bought it? YEAH RIGHT. I don't like people who lie to impress abunch of people on a forum that they don't know. What the hell does it matter? You have a problem. Get help.