Did the Market Forget About Sirius?

As I'm putting my virtual pen to electronic paper, over 60.5 million shares of Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) have changed hands on the Nasdaq market today. The satellite radio vendor looks like a sure bet to exceed its average trading volume of about 68 million shares per day.

Yet the stock is nowhere to be found in most rundowns of the most active stocks on the market today. Nasdaq itself reports that the three most popular trade papers this lovely Wednesday are the PowerShares QQQ Trust (Nasdaq: QQQQ) ETF, chip giant Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), and networking expert Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO). None of them have traded more than 45 million shares so far.

Stop the presses! Sound the alarm! Somebody is forgetting about Sirius! Right?

Well, no. There's nothing amiss here that Sirius couldn't fix with a simple reverse stock split if it wanted to. The lowest-priced stock on today's Nasdaq volume hit list is Huntington Bancshares (Nasdaq: HBAN), trading at $5.07 per stub. Expand the search to include NYSE stocks and you'll see Citigroup (NYSE: C) ruling the roost with over 440 million shares traded today. Sirius is simply stuck in penny-stock territory way below the $2 mark per share, and thus filtered out of these supposedly serious volume lists.

Here's what this bunch looks like in dollar volumes traded over the last three months:

Source: Yahoo! Finance, a division of Yahoo!

If Sirius had performed a 10-to-1 reverse split last night, assuming that everything else were equal today (same total value traded, perfectly spherical cows, etc.), the stock would have slid into the top-20 share volume list of Nasdaq in last place, pushing out Corinthian College (Nasdaq: COCO) by a slim margin. That would be one way to raise Sirius' public profile, I suppose -- making it eligible for inclusion in top-ten lists outside the David Letterman show.

I do think a reverse split would make sense for Sirius, if nothing else to get the company out of eternal worries about meeting Nasdaq's share-price minimums. Just don't think for a second that the market is forgetting about this stock -- it's more popular than these tabulations give it credit for.