Soaring share prices over the past few years have pushed a number of high-profile companies – including Nvidia Corp., Shopify Inc., Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Loblaw Cos. Ltd. – to announce stock splits.

Do you care?

The math behind stock splits certainly suggests that shrugs are in order, since you’re not left holding additional wealth.

When a company splits its stock two for one, it cuts the price of each share in half and doubles the number of outstanding shares. The financial impact on an investor: Zilch.

That is, if you had 100 shares of a company, valued at $20 each, your stake is worth $2,000. If the company announces a two-for-one stock split, you now have 200 shares valued at $10 each, but your stake is still valued at $2,000.

Yet, for anyone who has invested in a company that has announced a two-for-one split, a four-for-one split or a 10-for-one split, you might feel a tinge of satisfaction.

In some ways, splits look like an anachronism – a throwback to an earlier era when investors might have been limited to buying shares in 100 increments. High-priced shares could effectively price out smaller investors.

With electronic trading, though, investors can easily buy single shares today.

Some brokerages even allow fractional ownership now. Make a request to invest, say, $3,000 in Constellation Software Inc., and the brokerage quote might quote you 1.36363 shares for a total $2,999.98.

Another way around an expensive stock: Buy CDRs.

Canadian Depositary Receipts, launched by CIBC in 2021, are generally priced at about $20 each initially, and give investors fractional ownership of foreign stocks priced in Canadian dollars.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shares cost more than US$750,000 each if you’re buying the “A” shares on the New York Stock Exchange. But a CDR is yours for just $36.83 (on Tuesday morning).

“Keeping the upper bound below $100 promotes ease of access for investors who are starting with smaller amounts, and it also helps managed portfolios maintain low minimum investment levels and flexibility when building diversified positions,” Elliot Scherer, global head of the wealth solutions group at CIBC Capital Markets, said in an email.

If the takeaway here is that a high-priced stock no longer stands in our way, why do companies continue to split their shares?

When Loblaw announced a four-for-1 split in July, after the share price gained some 250 per cent over the previous four years, it provided three reasons: keep the shares accessible to retail investors; help employees who participate in the company ownership plan; and improve the liquidity.

On that third reason, more outstanding shares can inspire more trading, which can reduce price volatility.

There may be other reasons at work, though.

Chris Cullen, head of exchange-traded funds at Brompton Funds in Toronto, explained to me that stock splits can send a positive message to shareholders.

That message: “Our company has been successful, the share price has grown, and now we’re carving shares into smaller pieces so that YOU (the retail investor/employee/others) can invest and participate in the company’s future success,” Mr. Cullen said in an e-mail.

Still, some companies – Constellation, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. and Berkshire Hathaway, to name three examples – have bluntly refused to split their shares, for equally compelling reasons.

They believe that the unadjusted share price is an accurate reflection of how far their companies have progressed. High share prices might limit short-term trading, inspiring investors to hold on for the long term.

All this talk of stock splits has me wondering how you feel about them. To gauge that, please respond to this quick poll. These aren’t trick questions! I’ll share the results in an upcoming newsletter.