One of Wall Street's few certainties is that investors will always seek out the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how volatile the major indexes are. For the past two years, this bright light for the investing community has been companies enacting stock splits.

A stock split is an event that allows a publicly traded company to alter both its share price and share count without having any impact on its market cap or operations. It's a purely cosmetic change designed to either make shares more nominally affordable for everyday investors (i.e., a forward stock split) or to increase a company's share price to maintain a listing on a major stock exchange (a reverse stock split).

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Source Fool.com