How much is my position worth after 5-1 stock split?
The average price would be $125 which would be used to compute your basis. You paid $12,500 for the stock that is now worth $4,500 which is a loss of $8,000 overall if you sell at this point.
Just to offer another alternative, consider Certificates of Deposit (CDs) at an FDIC insured bank or credit union for small or short-term investments. If you don't need access to the money, as stated, and are not willing to take much risk, you could put money into a number of CDs instead of investing it in stocks, or just letting it sit in a regular savings/checking account. You are essentially lending money to the bank for a guaranteed length of time (anywhere from 3 to 60 months), and therefore they can give you a better rate of return than a savings account (which is basically lending it to them with the condition that you could ask for it all back at any time). Your rate of return in CDs is lower a typical stock investment, but carries no risk at all. CD rates typically increase with the length of the CD. For example, my credit union currently offers a 2.3% APY on a 5-year CD, but only 0.75% for 12 month CDs, and a mere 0.1% APY on regular savings/checking accounts. Putting your full $10K deposit into one or more CDs would yield $230 a year instead of a mere $10 in their savings account. If you go this route with some or all of your principal, note that withdrawing the money from a CD before the end of the deposit term will mean forfeiting the interest earned. Some banks may let you withdraw just a portion of a CD, but typically not. Work around this by splitting your funds into multiple CDs, and possibly different term lengths as well, to give you more flexibility in accessing the funds. Personally, I have a rolling emergency fund (~6 months living expenses, separate from all investments and day-to-day income/expenses) split evenly among 5 CDs, each with a 5-year deposit term (for the highest rate) with evenly staggered maturity dates. In any given year, I could close one of these CDs to cover an emergency and lose only a few months of interest on just 20% of my emergency fund, instead of several years interest on all of it. If I needed more funds, I could withdraw more of the CDs as needed, in order of youngest deposit age to minimize the interest loss - although that loss would probably be the least of my worries by then, if I'm dipping deeply into these funds I'll be needing them pretty badly.  Initially I created the CDs with a very small amount and differing term lengths (1 year increments from 1-5 years) and then as each matured, I rolled it back into a 5 year CD. Now every year when one matures, I add a little more principal (to account for increased living expenses), and roll everything back in for another 5 years. Minimal thought and effort, no risk, much higher return than savings, fairly liquid (accessible) in an emergency, and great peace of mind. Plus it ensures I don't blow the money on something else, and that I have something to fall back on if all my other investments completely tanked, or I had massive medical bills, or lost my job, etc. "The ex indicator is meant to be a help for market participants.  On the ex-day orders will go into a different order book, the ex order book, which at the start of the ex day will be totally empty, i.e. no orders from the non-ex day book have been copied over. Why does this help?  Well imagine you had a long-standing buy order in the book, well below the current price, and now the share price halves due to a 2-for-1 split, would you want to see your order executed? If so, your order should have gone into the ex-book which is only active on the ex-day (and orders in the ex book are usually copied over to the normal book on the day after the ex-day but this is exchange-specific). Think of it as an additional safety net to tell the exchange: ""I know what I'm doing: I want to buy this stock totally overpriced after the 2-for-1 split"". Now some exchanges and/or some securities (mostly derivatives) linked with the security in question don't have this notion of ex or the ex-book, and they will tell you by ""will not be quoted ex"" or ""the ex indicator is missing"". In your case (SNE) it is a sponsored ADR, the ex-date was Mar 28 2016, one day before the ex date of the Japanese original.  According to my understanding of NYSE rules, there is no specific rule for or against omitting the ex-indicator.  It seems to be a decision on a case by case basis.  Looking through the dividends of other Japanese ADRs I drew the conclusion none of them have an ex-book and so all of them are announced as: ""Will not be quoted ex by the exchange"".  Again, this is based on my observations." From Investopedia, A stock split is usually done by companies that have seen their share   price increase to levels that are either too high or are beyond the   price levels of similar companies in their sector. The primary motive   is to make shares seem more affordable to small investors even though   the underlying value of the company has not changed. From Wikipedia, It is often claimed that stock splits, in and of themselves, lead to   higher stock prices; research, however, does not bear this out. What   is true is that stock splits are usually initiated after a large run   up in share price...stock splits do increase the liquidity of a stock;   there are more buyers and sellers for 10 shares at $10 than 1 share at   $100. Some companies have the opposite strategy: by refusing to split   the stock and keeping the price high, they reduce trading volume.   Berkshire Hathaway is a notable example of this. Something more to munch on, Why Warren Buffett Is Against Stock Splits. This isn't an impressive headline, nor does it show amazing investment foresight, because they were a non-entity. Investing in them back then would have consisted of picking one of hundreds of companies with a good idea and the hope of someday becoming profitable, but risky as hell. A WSB.  A better headline for Netflix, and one that actually teaches a lesson on how to properly invest would be:  **$1,000 in Netflix 6 years ago worth $16K today.**  Around 2010, I was disappointed in myself for not grabbing NFLX earlier on, but didn't want to buy because I didn't think it had much upside... a little overpriced from what I saw.  Then in 2011, they made the stupid Qwikster announcement. Everyone bitched and moaned, and the stock price plummeted. I said to myself - is anyone actually canceling their subscription over this? Who exactly is the competition, the cable company who's 5-10x the price? Hulu, who have commercials?  How could their profits really suffer from this??  I couldn't see any way where they wouldn't claw it back once the dust settled. I bought 150 shares right away. Classic investment example of not succumbing to market panic and getting a good buy.  (Just wish I hadn't sold half my shares after the stock tripled!) "If you own 1% of a company, you are technically entitled to 1% of the current value and future profits of that company. However, you cannot, as you seem to imply, just decide at some point to take your ball and go home. You cannot call up the company and ask for 1% of their assets to be liquidated and given to you in cash. What the 1% stake in the company actually entitles you to is: 1% of total shareholder voting rights. Your ""aye"" or ""nay"" carries the weight of 1% of the total shareholder voting block. Doesn't sound like much, but when the average little guy has on the order of ten-millionths of a percentage point ownership of any big corporation, your one vote carries more weight than those of millions of single-share investors. 1% of future dividend payments made to shareholders. For every dollar the corporation makes in profits, and doesn't retain for future growth, you get a penny. Again, doesn't sound like much, but consider that the Simon property group, ranked #497 on the Fortune 500 list of the world's biggest companies by revenue, made $1.4 billion in profits last year. 1% of that, if the company divvied it all up, is $14 million. If you bought your 1% stake in March of 2009, you would have paid a paltry $83 million, and be earning roughly 16% on your initial investment annually just in dividends (to say nothing of the roughly 450% increase in stock price since that time, making the value of your holdings roughly $460 million; that does reduce your actual dividend yield to about 3% of holdings value). If this doesn't sound appealing, and you want out, you would sell your 1% stake. The price you would get for this total stake may or may not be 1% of the company's book value. This is for many reasons: Now, to answer your hypothetical: If Apple's stock, tomorrow, went from $420b market cap to zero, that would mean that the market unanimously thought, when they woke up tomorrow morning, that the company was all of a sudden absolutely worthless. In order to have this unanimous consent, the market must be thoroughly convinced, by looking at SEC filings of assets, liabilities and profits, listening to executive statements, etc that an investor wouldn't see even one penny returned of any cash investment made in this company's stock. That's impossible; the price of a share is based on what someone will pay to have it (or accept to be rid of it). Nobody ever just gives stock away for free on the trading floor, so even if they're selling 10 shares for a penny, they're selling it, and so the stock has a value ($0.001/share).  We can say, however, that a fall to ""effectively zero"" is possible, because they've happened. Enron, for instance, lost half its share value in just one week in mid-October as the scope of the accounting scandal started becoming evident. That was just the steepest part of an 18-month fall from $90/share in August '00, to just $0.12/share as of its bankruptcy filing in Dec '01; a 99.87% loss of value. Now, this is an extreme example, but it illustrates what would be necessary to get a stock to go all the way to zero (if indeed it ever really could). Enron's stock wasn't delisted until a month and a half after Enron's bankruptcy filing, it was done based on NYSE listing rules (the stock had been trading at less than a dollar for 30 days), and was still traded ""over the counter"" on the Pink Sheets after that point. Enron didn't divest all its assets until 2006, and the company still exists (though its mission is now to sue other companies that had a hand in the fraud, get the money and turn it around to Enron creditors). I don't know when it stopped becoming a publicly-traded company (if indeed it ever did), but as I said, there is always someone willing to buy a bunch of really cheap shares to try and game the market (buying shares reduces the number available for sale, reducing supply, increasing price, making the investor a lot of money assuming he can offload them quickly enough)." There has been a lot of research on the effects of stock splits. Some studies have concluded that: However note that (i) these are averages over large samples and does not say it will work on every split and (ii) most of the research is a bit dated and more recent papers have often struggled to find any significant performance impact after 1990, possibly because the effect has been well documented and the arbitrage no longer exists. This document summarises the existing research on the subject although it seems to miss some of the more recent papers. More practically, if you pay a commission per share, you will pay more commissions after the split than before. Bottom line: don't overthink it and focus on other criteria to decide when/whether to invest. If you do this, you own a stock worth $1, with a basis of $2. The loss doesn't get realized until the shares are sold. Of course, we hope you see the stock increase above that price, else, why do this? I was looking for ideas on what the usual figures are in such positions. Something like market value, or other terms such as changing slab percentages in compensation. Not sure what the best practices are in this situation.  Not sure what you are referring to.