GE Announced Tons Wednesday. This Was the Real Bombshell.

The question is why? Most companies spit their stock, creating a lower share price and more shares outstanding, as stock prices rise over time. Companies appear to like to have a stock price at a certain level, following the Goldilocks principle of not too high and not too low.

That appears to be the reason for this reverse split, too. A scan of GE’s peers shows share prices in the $100 to $200 range and share counts in the hundreds of millions. GE simply looks like an outlier.

Investors like splits. They take them as a sign that things are getting better and that management expects prices to rise in the near future. Reverse splits, on the other hand, can make investors nervous. They can be interpreted as a sign the business is getting worse.

The academic data appears to bear that fear out. A Journal of Finance study partly authored by Nobel laureate Eugene Fama found that splits are favorable and that reverse splits are ominous for one- and three-year forward stock returns. Splitters outperform the market and reverse splitters lag behind it.

But there are a few caveats. First, the data set included almost 6,000 stock splits, but fewer than 100 reverse splits. Reverse splits are very rare. It’s tough to make a blanket statement from a small data set.

What is more, many academic papers look at old data. The Fama data set includes stocks trading in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. A lot has changed in the marketplace since then.

One common theme of stock-split studies, for instance, is a split’s impact on overall liquidity. A lower share price is simply within reach of more shareholders. More investors means more stock trading on any given day. That can make shares less volatile and less risky.

Now, though, brokers offer share “slices” for as little as $5, essentially giving stock exposure to anyone who wants it, despite the absolute level any stock trades at.

Concern about a deteriorating business may not be a factor with GE’s reverse split. The company isn’t what it once was, but that is old news. GE stock is down roughly 75% from its all-time high, but the slide happened long ago. CEO Larry Culp was brought in during 2018 to turn around struggling operations.

A lot of progress has been made. GE has paid back more than $70 billion in debt over the past few years. Deals such as the jet-leasing sale to AerCap (AER), the sale of the biopharma business to Danaher (DHR) and sales of stock in the oil-services provider Baker Hughes (BKR) are making the reduction possible.

Despite the pandemic, which devastated demand for travel and the jet-aircraft engines GE makes, the stock is trading at the highest level since Culp took over. Coming into Wednesday, shares were up about 30% year to date, far better than comparable gains of the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Investors are focusing now on what GE said about its future. GE maintained its forecasts for about 20 cents in per-share earnings and about $3.5 billion in free cash flow for 2021. Management says there will be modest growth in the key aviation business.

That limited growth would return GE Aviation’s sales to levels realized around 2017, far from their pre-pandemic level in 201. That looks like a cautious call now that vaccines are rolling out across the globe, but Culp is fine with that.

““We won’t be offended if [anyone] calls us conservative,” he told Barron’s.

Being conservative is probably the right move for GE given all the internal and industrywide challenges the company has faced in recent years.

The stock split is neither conservative nor aggressive. But it is another sign things are changing and that GE wants to be viewed as an industrial conglomerate, and not as the hybrid of manufacturing and finance the company became during the 1990s and 2000s.

Write to Al Root at [email protected]