After hovering just below $200 per share for the first three months of the year, Nvidia's (NVDA +1.02%) stock price surged past that level in May. Now, $200 is starting to look more like a floor for the chipmaker's share price as opposed to a ceiling.
But Nvidia's management clearly likes to keep its shares affordable. The company has regularly conducted stock splits, including two in the last five years alone. With the stock price up more than 80% since the last split, could another split be coming this year? Here's what we know.
Image source: Nvidia.
Two by two
Nvidia has split its stock six times since 2000. But those splits haven't come at regular intervals. Instead, they've come in pairs.
The first two splits were just 15 months apart, in June 2000 and September 2001. Then, there was a big gap before the next ones, which were just 17 months apart in April 2006 and September 2007. After a 14-year gap, we got a split in July 2021, followed by another in June 2024. So history suggests we should have a much longer wait for the next split.
That's doubly true since the 2024 split was a doozy. Instead of a standard 2-for-1 split -- in which each stockholder receives two new shares for every one old share they hold, with the new shares worth half of the old share price -- the 2024 split was 10-for-1, which increased the number of outstanding shares tenfold but also cut the stock price from about about $1,200 to about $120.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
Because most brokerages now offer investors the option of purchasing fractional shares, a high stock price isn't necessarily a barrier to stock ownership for individual investors. Considering that Nvidia's shares were well above $1,000 before management split them two years ago, another split this year seems unlikely unless the company's share price goes stratospheric.
