STRUCTURE Market Structure · April 2026 · ~4 min

Market cap vs price: don't be fooled by the sticker

"This one's $0.50 and that one's $500, so the cheap one has more room to run!" — sounds reasonable, and it's the most misleading illusion there is. What measures an asset's size is its market cap, not its unit price.

Unit price is meaningless

Market cap = price × supply. An asset at $0.50 with a hundred-billion supply can dwarf one at $500 with a tiny supply. The sticker price only reflects "how many slices it was cut into" — it has nothing to do with cheap or expensive, or with room to run. Splits and issuance change the price instantly without changing the cap.

What to look at

• Market cap: the real size — how much buying it takes to double again;
• Float: the part actually trading; heavy lockups mean bigger swings;
• Cap ranking: the size of a tile in the heatmap is market cap, made visual.

Asking "how much per share" is meaningless; ask "how much is the whole thing worth."