One of the most crucial aspects of stock trading is also one of the most overlooked. 

Traders spend hours analyzing charts, indicators, and fundamentals. 

But they completely miss the one factor that can make or break their trades before they even enter: 

How human psychology affects the price action around round numbers.

These key psychological levels are financial battlegrounds where millions of traders fight for gains. 

But not all round numbers are created equal…

There’s one specific price level that changes everything for a stock…

$1.00

Below $1 per share, a stock is essentially locked out from the majority of serious money in the market. Big funds can’t hold it. Many brokers won’t sell it. There are rules specifically designed to keep professional capital away from it. So the stock just sits there, starved of buyers.

Then it crosses $1…

The moment that happens, the rules change. Restrictions that kept big money out no longer apply. The stock shows up in places it didn’t before. New buyers who couldn’t legally own it yesterday can buy it today. And all of that tends to happen at once.

That’s The Rubicon Effect. 

It’s what StocksToTrade Lead Trainer Tim Bohen has spent over 20 years studying…

And he’s built a brand-new algorithm to capitalize on it…

Get his FREE trade idea TOMORROW at 8 p.m.

Why $1 Is The King Of Round Numbers

The dollar threshold isn’t some arbitrary red line. There are concrete reasons for its importance. 

NASDAQ requires every stock on its exchange to stay above $1. If a stock trades below that level for 30 straight business days, the company gets a warning, and the clock starts ticking. Under rules tightened in January 2025, that clock moves faster than it used to, and there’s less room to stall.

There’s also a separate SEC rule called the Penny Stock Rule. Any stock under $1 gets classified as a penny stock, which means brokers have to jump through extra hoops before they can sell it to customers. Extra paperwork. Extra disclosures. For a lot of firms, it’s just not worth the hassle.

The practical result: most of the big money in the market has systems that automatically skip over stocks below $1. It’s built into the software. Cross back above a dollar, and those automatic exclusions disappear.

The Psychology Behind Round Numbers

On top of the rules, there’s a well-documented human behavior at play: people pay special attention to round numbers.

A 2025 working paper from Georgetown University analyzed about 134 million trades across more than 20 million brokerage accounts. The finding: trades at whole-dollar prices happen over three times more often than you’d expect by chance. The researchers estimated that this round-number effect moves more than $850 million per year between buyers and sellers.

Southern Methodist University found the same thing in a separate study of over 100 million transactions. People watch round numbers. Algorithms watch round numbers. When a stock approaches $1, there’s a crowd already forming.

The $1 level is special because it’s not just a psychological magnet. It’s also where the regulatory rules flip. 

Psychology plus hard rules: that combination is what makes it different from every other round number on the board…

The 5 Shifts That Happen When A Stock Crosses $1

Bohen’s framework breaks down what actually changes the moment a stock crosses $1:

1. Big money can buy it. Funds and institutions that had compliance-based restrictions on sub-dollar stocks are suddenly cleared to take a position.

2. Broker restrictions ease. The extra regulatory burden tied to the penny stock classification goes away. The stock becomes easier to sell through mainstream channels.

3. It shows up in places it didn’t before. Stock screeners, research platforms, and brokerage tools that filter out sub-dollar stocks will now surface it in results.

4. Retail traders start watching. The Georgetown and SMU research isn’t abstract. There are real traders sitting with alerts set at the dollar level. Many of them are waiting for exactly this cross.

5. Algorithms react. Quantitative trading systems designed to track compliance thresholds and price-level momentum will register the crossing and can add significant volume in the minutes and hours that follow.

None of this happens in stages. It happens together, all at once, in a stock that often doesn’t have the float to absorb that much sudden demand quietly.

How the Algorithm Works

Buying every stock that crosses $1 isn’t the strategy. That wouldn’t work. Plenty of stocks cross the dollar mark because they’ve been reverse-split back above it or because of a short-term news spike with nothing behind it. Those aren’t real setups.

The Rubicon Algorithm filters for quality. One of the three criteria is public: any stock has to have at least $1 million in average daily volume to qualify. That knocks out the illiquid, easily-manipulated names where you can’t get in or out cleanly. The other two filters are proprietary, but they’re designed to separate genuine momentum crossings from the noise.

The output is simple: yellow means watch, green means buy, orange means hold, red means exit. It runs from 4 AM to 8 PM ET every trading day.

Historically, the system has produced a 74% win rate on filtered setups, with an average gain of 32% per trade, versus 5% on unfiltered dollar crosses. 

That gap shows what the filtering is actually doing.

And considering that:

• There are more sub-dollar stocks today than at almost any point in recent history…
• A new SEC rule has made the $1 crossing more significant from a market mechanics standpoint than it used to be…
• The academic literature on round-number behavior keeps confirming what traders have known informally for a long time…

This catalyst is impossible to ignore.

The $1 mark has always mattered. 

But now, it matters more than ever…

Why This Matters NOW

A few weeks ago, the United States government quietly passed a new amendment. No fanfare, almost zero media coverage.

But this amendment is already supercharging a small group of stocks by as much as 9,900%.*

When this exact type of setup has appeared in the past, it delivered positive gains 3 out of every 4 times.

That’s why Tim Sykes and Bohen are holding an emergency LIVE briefing tomorrow…

You’re about to discover how this new amendment could flood your watchlist with setups that have historically delivered gains 3 out of every 4 times.

Plus, you’ll see the specific stock Bohen is recommending you act on the moment the session ends.

Here’s what you’ll discover on Wednesday:

• How one government decision is flooding the market with a setup Tim Bohen is calling the “simplest for new traders.”
• Why gains of 377%,* 955%,* even 2,373%* have shown up in these exact types of setups in the past, and how you can position yourself for the next one.
• Why Bohen says practically anyone can target these, even if you’ve never placed a trade before.
• Plus, Bohen is revealing a trading secret he’s never revealed publicly in his two decades of full-time trading. He calls it one of his “strongest edges,” and he’s never even shared it with his closest friends before. On Wednesday, he’s spilling the details during this special live briefing.

Get Tim’s FREE trade idea LIVE — TOMORROW, March 25th at 8 PM EST.

Be good (and be good to others),

Ben Sturgill

*Past performance does not indicate future results