The thing to remember about any share split is that it is revenue-neutral for everyone involved. There is no money changing hands. If a person owned 500 shares of $1 stock and it went through a reverse 5-1 split, they would simply have 100 shares of $5 stock afterwards. In each case they could sell it for $500. Traditional splits help keep the share price down which is nice in some ways because anyone can go buy a round number of shares....say 100 or 1000. Reverse splits are required to meet the requirements of the stock exchange. They will delist a stock trading for pennys.