Did someone lose a few millions?

I was leisurely ambling along the Information Highway, as is my habit during these carbohydrate induced lethargic afternoons, when I saw this bit of information that grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me wide awake(carbohydrates or no carbohydrates) before I could say "Hey!"

The top loser of the day, ICICI wanted to tell me, was the very company I work for. I can now picture what must've happened inside my cranium at that very moment. So there are these few million neurons sitting around lazily, a few of them catching up on that lost sleep, splashing around in the lovely endorphins, when one of them receives this phone call. A lazy drawled out "hello" quickly followed by a loud shocked "What!?" and then a skull piercing scream usually tends to catch the attention of most well-meaning individuals and they tend to inquire what the cause of the commotion might be. Upon being provided the gyan the neighboring neurons, and soon all the neurons, launch their own customized histrionics (should it be neuronics ?).

Questions were flying around. Is the company on the way out? did they discover a skeleton in Its cupboard? Did they muck up a major deal? I know for a fact that they recently announced quarter results and were actually doing pretty well. The biggest question however was: why is nobody bothered? A quick look around confirms that everybody is oblivious to the occurence, happily tapping away at their keyboards. Where are the startled looks? where are the angry protests? Where are the people who lost a few millions and are ready to jump out of those windows?

I tried to do some online research and looking through the company's recent press releases and

announcements yielded nothing. Just confirmation that the stock value has indeed been chopped in half! A whopping 50%.

I call up my dear friend Bala. His neurons unlike mine seemed to be milling around quite actively. I almost heard him say "Elementary my dear Watson". He turned on the giant spotlight and things became as clear as day. Turns out the answer is quite simple and somehow the fact that the company announced a 1:1 stock split for today, evaded my quest for more information. Bala gimme the link so I can put it up here :) (One of these days I gotta bug this guy and learn to trade in options, futures and derivatives. Who knows how many untold millions I'm losing by not already dabbling in those exotic sounding money sources. (or drains :p))

Thus enlightened I proceeded to go back to my state of transcendental web-browsing. My neurons (gladly) returned to their quiescent state, quickly relegating the above incident into the barely efficient cold storage that is my memory. I might expand on that metaphor in another blog. Just ask :)