Amazon (AMZN) shares moved higher Wednesday, potentially extending their recent winning streak to a sixth consecutive session, ahead of an end-of-week stock split for the world's biggest online retailer.
Amazon said shareholders approved the 20-for-1 split, which was first made public in March, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last Friday.
Amazon said shareholders of record on May 24 will receive 19 extra shares of the group for each one held. Trading is expected to begin on a split-adjusted basis on June 6.
The split follows a similar move by Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) earlier this year, likely to take place in July, that would leave investors with one Google stock and a dividend payment of 19 more shares, all priced at around $160 each.
Apple (AAPL) and Tesla (TSLA) have also executed splits over the past two years, and today's move makes Amazon stock a more attractive and attainable proposition for retail investors who, powered by a wave of mobile trading apps and zero-commission brokers, suddenly find their collective power capturing the attention of the biggest companies in the world.
Amazon shares were marked 2.4% higher in early Wednesday trading to change hands at $2,462.00 each, a move that marks a 22% gain over the past week. That would equate to a post-split price of around $123.10 each when trading begins on Monday.
Amazon's possible inclusion in the Dow can't be ignored, either, now that S&P Dow Jones Officials can work with a share price of around $120 each.
The price-weighted Dow attempts to smooth-out the vagaries of splits and dividends in its 30 stock collection through the Dow divisor, a number that represents the affect of a stock price change on the overall average.
At $2,400 a share, however, even a small price change in Amazon would be far too big a disruption for the average, which may explain why that it's sitting on the outside looking in, despite its market-leading position in global e-commerce and its $1.24 trillion market cap.
S&P Dow Jones Indices classifies Amazon as a consumer discretionary stock, while Google is considered communications services, but both would have a strong case for Dow inclusion given their industry dominance and planet-like influence on broader financial markets.
Early last month, Amazon shares suffered their biggest single-session decline in fifteen years after the group posted a surprise first quarter loss of $3.8 billion and the slowest pace of year-on-year revenue growth in more than a decade.
Amazon Web Services was the usual bright spot in the otherwise disappointing first quarter report, with revenues rising 36.6% from last year to $18.44 billion, with a near-term order backlog of around $90 billion. The division earned just over $6.5 billion with a profit margin of around 35%.
