We've noted before that stock splits have gone largely out of fashion, but MasterCard announced a whopper yesterday: The credit card company is splitting its shares ten for one. Although MasterCard is a longtime familiar name, it just had its IPO in 2006, at a share price of $47. Since then it's risen by more than 1500 percent to its current, unwieldy level of $781 a share.
MasterCard becomes just the 12th company in the S&P 500 this year to announce a split. That makes 2013 the year with the fourth-lowest number of splits on record. In the 1990s, there were an average of more than 60 splits a year.
But there are many more stocks still ripe for the splitting. Five other stocks in the S&P 500 have share prices of more than $500, including Google at $1,084 and Priceline.com at $1,188. As recently as the end of 2011, Google was the only stock in the S&P 500 with a share price of more than $500.
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