how does a stock become a laggard perhaps the company continually misses earnings or sales estimates or shows shaky fundamentals lower priced stocks also carry more risk because they often feature less dollar based trading liquidity and exhibit bigger spreads between the bid and ask prices 
everybody loves a bargain but when it comes to investing a cheap or laggard stock may not be the best deal you could very well end up getting what you paid for while a stock share at 2 5 or 10 may seem like it has lots of upside most stocks selling for 10 or less are cheap for a reason they have had some sort of deficiency in the past or they have something wrong with them now a better strategy may be to to buy fewer shares of an institutional quality stock that s rising soundly rather than thousands of shares of a cheap stock top mutual funds and other big players prefer companies with sound earnings and sales track records and share prices of at least 15 on the nasdaq and 20 on the nyse they also prefer volumes to be at least 400 000 shares a day which allows funds to make trades with less impact on the share price 