It seems to be exchange-specific, I assume the main reason for this article is:

> For example, on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), if a security's price closed below $1.00 for 30 consecutive trading days, that exchange would initiate the delisting process.

It can be avoided via a "reverse stock-split", which seems to be easy enough to get approved (no owners of the stock want to be delisted!), so nothing hugely dangerous... But it's not a good sign for you company's general health I guess.

Just a wild guess, but I suspect that stocks below a certain price are too vulnerable to price manipulation via pump and dump schemes.

It's bad enough when stocks like GameStop were treated like a meme and turned into a casino game- you could create an entire industry out of doing that to sub-penny stocks because the low price per share makes even small changes in price very impactful.

If that were correct it would be based on market cap not stock price

It's likely just because for legacy reasons exchanges can't handle fractions of a cent, so below $1 the price becomes too discrete

surely price manipulation is a function of the market cap, not the share price.

again, people don't buy stocks with actual physical cash. theres no reason why we are tied to whole pennies. a 2c stock could rise or fall 1% in the same way as a $2 stock could.

plus lowering the number of shares in circulation isn't going to make it less susceptible to pump and dumps.

finance is populated by a lot of extremely well paid people, I can't believe everyone has a blind spot around 'bigger arbitrary token size == better'

As long as stocks are primarily owned if not traded by humans, I do think its a good idea to have a lower limit on the price. There's a sweet spot, where humans have an ability to discern price movements. If there are too many zeroes before or after the price, we can't tell if the price moved and what it means. So we don't have $45000 stocks or 45 cent stocks.

But on my dealers website I can look at price history and it will tell me the price history and percentage for the past day/ week/ month / year.

To put in bluntly. If you're letting human factors get involved your doing it wrong.

My naive layman question would be, what does that actually mean? Couldn't they just issue fewer shares and get a higher price for each one?

Yes.

if you have 100,000 shares in circulation at $10 each you have a market cap of $1,000,000.

the same as if you had 10 x $100,000 shares, or 1,000,000 x $1 shares.

but why the rule? theres no reason why my $1 share can't rise 0.1% just like the $10 share. they don't hand me a 1/10th penny coin. so why arbitrarily decide that stocks below $x are bad?

yes a 1c movement is proportionately more, but if youre saying that humans are so obviously psychologically anchored by such round numbers, then the least of humanities problems, and finances, and capitalisms, is the price of a share.

Stocks that trade under $5/share are considered "penny stocks", exchanges generally don't want penny stocks on their list because they don't want to endorse them. They're highly volatile, and can be easily manipulated.

I believe for DIJA if they have a valuation under $2 for longer than a year they get delisted.

This doesn't mean you can't trade them anymore, they just become OTC (over the counter) stocks. Many brokers offer access to OTC stocks, but liquidity is a real concern with those stocks.

Also, if a stock gets delisted that isn't necessarily permanent. If the company gets it act together it can be re-listed on the exchange. For example, Tandy Leather Factory was delisted from Nasdaq in 2020 because of accounting problems (I think) and was re-listed about 3 months ago.

Yeah, it's just the culture around it, with the US doing its pricing in $, the UK doing it in p.