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These Are the Most Valuable Stocks By Spencer Jakab

Stocks bounced back

from last week's tech wreck with their best gain since May. But not all of the big tech names are likely to follow through today: Nvidia is down in early trading on a report that Google parent Alphabet may be muscling in

on its AI chip business. The main reason for Monday's rally seemed to be odds shifting in favor

of another Fed rate cut next month. Producer-price data today could shift the mood.

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The stock market's thousand-dollar club was worth every penny.

When Netflix split its stock 10-for-one

last week, it left that exceptional group-members of the S&P 500 with at least four-digit prices. But its shareholders have no reason to complain: They've made an almost unbelievable 89,000% return since the streaming star's initial public offering in 2002.

There are now 10 such U.S. stocks remaining, and most have been listed for longer than Netflix. An investor who had divided $10,000 evenly among them in January 2000 (including Netflix) would have a cool $1.5 million today versus just $73,000 for an S&P 500 index fund.

Even the poorest performer, Berkshire Hathaway's Class A stock, trounced the market. It also happens to be the most richly priced at three-quarters of a million dollars.

Chief Executive Warren Buffett, seeking to discourage speculation, has refused to split its stock . He finally issued lower-priced "Baby Berkshire" shares in 1996 to thwart promoters setting up a fund that would have given them fractional ownership. Berkshire then split those lower-priced B shares 50-for-one to aid in a 2010 acquisition-a step that also let it into the S&P 500.

There's no mystery why stocks with four or more digits are top performers-they couldn't have gotten there otherwise. The real head scratcher is why investors cheer when management decides to split a stock (like Netflix, which beat the market by 2.4 percentage points the day after its announcement).

A split has no effect on the value of an investor's shares, and brokers offering fractional ownership now make splits unnecessary. But there's a longstanding tendency to bid prices up on the news. Analysts at UBS have said the effect has averaged about two percentage points in the session following a split announcement. There was even a gimmicky split-focused fund that shut down in 2017.

Far more common are reverse splits, which reduce shares outstanding. They predominate because most stocks perform poorly (indexes march higher because of a small number of winners). Companies fearful of delisting, often "penny stocks," do them to bolster their prices. Of the 239 decisions to change shares outstanding on U.S. exchanges since June, a striking 222 were reverse splits, according to LSEG Refinitiv.

With Netflix's departure, the $1,000 club includes companies like homebuilder NVR, retailer AutoZone, asset manager BlackRock, drugmaker Eli Lilly and online travel agent Booking. Conspicuously absent are the "Magnificent Seven."

But Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, Nvidia and Microsoft would all be well above $1,000 too had they not split over the years. Prices of the first five rose following their most recent announcements.

The need to multiply shares outstanding and a really high price both are signs of an illustrious history. Those qualities might be lasting, but investors should remember the mutual fund boilerplate: Past performance does not guarantee future results.

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Stocks I'm Watching

Alphabet : Facebook owner Meta Platforms is in talks to spend billions on Google's AI chips, the Information reported, as Google steps up efforts to compete directly with Nvidia. Shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, rose premarket.

Nvidia : Shares in the semiconductor maker sold off ahead of the open, as did other chip stocks, including Advanced Micro Devices , Intel and Qualcomm .

SoftBank : Shares in the Japanese technology conglomerate slid 10% amid worries that Google's updated Gemini language model

will intensify competition for OpenAI, a major SoftBank investment.

Alibaba : The Chinese e-commerce leader is due to post earnings Tuesday morning. Alibaba shares extended Monday's rally in Hong Kong trading ahead of the results.

Best Buy : The consumer-technology retailer, which has boosted prices on some items to offset tariffs, is due to post earnings this morning. Analog Devices , J.M. Smucker and Kohl's are among other companies slated to report.

Agilent Technologies : The laboratory supplier and services company posted better-than-projected quarterly results, but its adjusted per-share earnings guidance disappointed. Shares fell around 1% in offhours trading.

Zoom Communications : The video-conferencing company's quarterly results topped estimates, as did its annual forecasts. The stock gained roughly 3.5% offhours.

One Big Chart

Why Google's Soaring Stock Is Defying Fears of an AI Bubble

Someone forgot to tell Google about the whole "AI bubble" thing. In a brutal month for tech stocks-especially those closely associated with the artificial-intelligence race-the internet-search giant has solidly bucked the trend .

What I'm Reading To blunt Trump's push to reclaim global manufacturing, China's factories and ports are learning to make and export more goods faster, cheaper and with fewer workers using robots and AI. ( WSJ ) Amazon is expanding its offerings to include high-ticket items such as cars and luxury goods, moving beyond everyday essentials. ( WSJ ) As China and the U.S. race to dominate artificial intelligence, countries are increasingly wary of becoming overly dependent on the superpowers for a technology that could profoundly affect their economic competitiveness and national security. ( WSJ ) Allies of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell have laid the groundwork for him to push a rate cut through a divided committee at next month's meeting even though it could draw multiple dissents. ( WSJ ) Not like Enron: In a private seven-page memo sent by Nvidia's investor relations team to Wall Street analysts over the weekend, the chip maker directly addressed a dozen claims made by skeptical investors. ( Barron's ) Today in Markets History

On this day in 1835, Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland. Carnegie came to the U.S. when he was 13 and went on to forge the steel industry that made America's railroads, bridges and cars possible. By 1901 he was the world's richest man.

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About Me

Business and finance have fascinated me for a long time. Before writing this newsletter, I edited The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street team for a decade, wrote two investment books and managed a team of stock analysts at a global investment bank.

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November 25, 2025 06:40 ET (11:40 GMT)

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