Is anyone else surprised that up 50% is $4?
Is anyone else surprised that up 50% is $4?
Which I think is what the unfairly downvoted comment above was referring to.
Really? What are you basing that on?
Stock splits are only about convenience. Imagine if all we had are $100 bills. Buying groceries will be quite a hassle. The government then decides to do a split and let everyone exchange their $100 bills with 10 $10 bills. Everyone still has the same amount of cash but it's now easier for the average consumer to buy their groceries.
How would the existence of a $10 bill mean the economy is in trouble?
Sometimes funds have covenants on not buying stocks below $5 because they are considered penny stocks and funds want to claim they focus on quality.
Surprisingly, couldn't immediately find a good academic research paper on behavior of low-priced stocks. A priori -
- very expensive stocks might be a little cheaper than they otherwise would be, high cost makes them harder to buy for individuals and low cost funds.
(e.g. if Berkshire Hathaway stock is $200,000, an individual with a $100,000 portfolio can't buy it, and even a pretty big portfolio can't fine-tune exposure with a lot of granularity. Hence, some enterprising fellows started funds that would just own Berkshire and sell shares in smaller increments, and Buffett got annoyed at that and launched Berkshire B, which sells for $146).
- very low priced stocks might be more volatile and show interesting behavior at certain thresholds, penny stocks below $1 might be overpriced since it's a hotbed of speculation, stocks that cross $5 might experience some excess selling so they might be underpriced, on the other hand they might experience some short covering as they become unmarginable for some.
But anyway, companies usually aim for a stock price in the $10-100 order of magnitude because that's the area where even relatively small investors wouldn't have a problem fine tuning their exposure.
Price < $5 is usually an indication it's well off its high.
Perhaps the surprising thing is the $4.7B market cap on AMD?