Quote:
Originally Posted by billscamaros
So let me ask another question about the Google Finance charts. Looking at Duke Power (DUK) on the chart, I toggle the 10 year view and notice that in around mid 2006, the price went from $33.21 on 10.37M (shares?) to $18.74 on 34.68M (shares?). Does this indicate that the stock "split"? This would be a good thing? On the 5 year chart, it looks as though the price has remained steady .... I assume that this isn't the good growth that you're looking for?
I do have to say that I'm getting a little hooked on checking various stocks out on Google Finance.
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What you are looking at there isn't a stock split - it's a dramatic drop in stock price! The other number is the volume of shares traded - I'm not familiar with DUK, but there was obviously a reason (rational, or not) that the price dropped so far and the market reacted with a lot of people trading a lot of shares. (One thing to always remember is that for every share sold, there has to be a buyer somewhere - while half of the traders were freaking out and selling, the other half was buying!) Charts are generally 'split adjusted' meaning it shows the graph as though the splits never happened to keep the chart easier to read.
(EDIT - you got me curious, and a quick search showed that in January 2007 Duke Energy spun off part of its business (forming a new seperate company called Spectra Energy, NYSE:SE) and gave each shareholder 1 share in SE for every 2 shares they held in DUK. This means that if you previously owned DUK, you now owned shares in both DUK and SE. The drop in the stock price would be the market response to this. It makes sense when you think about it - DUK should be worth less money now that the company is smaller, and the market reflected that. This is kind of a special case and isn't something that happens everyday!)
If you click on the 'settings' button below the graph you can turn a lot of the indicators on and off. Take a look at NKE or SBUX and run it out to 5 or 10 years and you'll see at least one split in there.
Make sense?
Marcus