Psssst! Hey, buddy... wanna buy a letter "R"? No? Well, then how about a hot stock tip that's 110 percent guaranteed to come true? Because our team of genetically-enhanced atomic psychics is surer than sure that two weeks from Monday, Apple's stock price (which has been on a rampage of late, more than tripling over the course of the past year) will have cratered by 50 percent overnight. And if you don't believe the atomic psychics, faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini was the first to inform us that an official Apple press release confirms the imminent price drop. That's right, folks, AAPL's price is going to be halved before March. Oh no!! Run away!!

Okay, fine, it's not actually as bad as all that, since the number of shares is going to be doubling at the same time. Yes, boys and girls, we're talking about that rarest of rare AAPL activities, the stock split. Apple's board has apparently approved a two-for-one split of the company's 900 million shares, and anyone with some AAPL kicking around in their portfolios as of the close of the markets on February 18th will discover that each of those shares will have automagically split into two, with each post-split share being half as valuable as before. In other words, you get twice as many shares, but each share is half as good. Seeing as AtAT is all about quantity over quality, we wholeheartedly approve.

For those keeping score, this is AAPL's first stock split since the tulipbulb.com heyday of mid-2000-- when the NASDAQ was trading at over 4000 and venture capitalists routinely threw rose-scented wads of thousand-dollar bills at anyone who scrawled the phrase "I'M A-GONNA SELL STUFF ON THAT THERE INTERNET" on the back of an envelope with a crayon, so we're not entirely sure it counts. And that was only the second split in the company's history, with the first having taken place way back in June of 1987. So you bet your boots that this is a pretty momentous occasion, and you should definitely start making plans for a Split Party to celebrate; sure, since the number of shares doubles while the value per share halves, a split is theoretically a financial non-event. In reality, though, companies doing poorly never split their stock, so people take it to be a sign of growth and stability. (And well they should; just for giggles, compare AAPL's relative growth from five years ago compared to the stocks of Dell, Microsoft, Intel, and Gateway.) Meanwhile, smaller investors tend to climb on board when the per-share price looks more "affordable"-- and the likelihood of smaller investors buying in when the price goes down makes everyone buy more in advance of the split, anticipating the ensuing price spike, which is why AAPL rose another $3 after the split announcement.

So what does all this mean to you? Well, if you own AAPL like we do (and if you don't, aren't you kicking yourself yet?), it means that pretty soon you'll own more. And whether you own AAPL or not, it also means that now might be a fine time to buy some, since you're looking at a two-for-one sale from now until split-adjusted trading on the 28th. Okay, sure, it's only a "sale" in the same sense that a department store doubling its jewelry prices immediately before taking 50 percent off is a "sale"; you don't actually save any money, but you sure feel like you did, don't you?