Should you buy expensive stocks?

On June 7th each share in Nvidia is due to become many. In one sense such stock splits ought not to matter much: they merely lower the share price, usually returning it to somewhere near $100, in order to make small trades easier. Yet for the company and its longtime backers this administrative exercise is cause to pop the champagne. For a split to be necessary in the first place, the share price must have multiplied, commonly by two or three, prompting each share to be divided by the same factor. Each Nvidia share, however, will become ten. Two years ago both Alphabet and Amazon split each of their shares into 20. Investors in big tech have had plenty of opportunities to let the corks fly.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Pay up”