I thought I knew well about how the market cap value of a stock is caculated util today when I tried to use "shares outstanding" to compute the market value (shares_outstanding x eod_price) for a number of stocks including FB and GOOG. FB market cap were bigger than GOOG. How? Checked yahoo/google financial and bloomberg, they all reported the same "outstanding shares". For GOOG, the "shares float" 579M is bigger than "shares outstanding" 341.6M. This is ridiculous. When I tried to check more stocks, I see more than 50 stocks having "float" more than "outstanding" shares. These stocks are "ACTG AES ALV ANIK CCL CBF FMCC FOX NXPI GOOG ....". I thought somehow "float" would be "outstanding" due to typos. But using "float" to caculate market cap, the cap is still very far from the expected/reported market cap value. Actually, no matter which kind of shares (outstanding or float), for many stocks, the market cap by (totoal shares multiplied by price) is very far from the reported market cap, such as FB and GOOG. Looks like there are hidden stock shares for some companies like FB and GOOG. someone knows why?
Don't want to speak for all the companies mentioned, but for GOOG you realise there are different classes of shares. Two of those are GOOG and GOOGL. If you check shares outstanding, you see 288M for one type and 342M for the other. Total 630M which works out to almost the market cap expected. I think there is another non-traded class held by insiders. In each case the float is listed as 579M (not dependent on class).
thanks for your reply. i saw two types of google stocks, even put them together the total 630M still far from the expected 680M around. i though "outstanding" should also include all insider hold stocks which is not reported in "float". looking at most other well established stocks like IBM, i do not see any problem. so, still not quite understand what is missing from those well-known stock info web sites.
FWIW if I check the company Fundamentals for Googl on IB, I get 683,348,174 shares outstanding, with 630,331,005 floating. Interesting as well is when I do the same for Goog i get : data not available
Thanks. I checked it again on Google NASDAQ:GOOG, "Diluted Weighted Average Shares" on Financial's page is 689.5M as expected for computing the market cap. While bloomberg site seems removed Key Statistics. But Yahoo Financial still shows a "outstanding shares" 341.6M.
All data is stale - but you don't know how stale unless you know exactly where it was sourced and what time/date it represents. For shares on issue you might have: Today's value Yesterday's value Latest quarterly report (which comes out somewhat after the end of the quarter) A trailing 12 month average, as of a given date (which might only come out somewhat after the most end-of-quarter) A fiscal-year-to-date average (which might only come out somewhat after the most end-of-quarter) A fully diluted variant of each of the above which includes all stock and convertible securities. The definition of "float" varies too. I've seen that means excluding insider-held shares and shareholders with >5% of the company but have also found other definitions. Lastly, different classes of shares may have different ownership level and voting rights. Take BRK.A and BRK.B - BRK.A has 1500 times more ownership rights per share and 10000 times more voting rights per share so such different classes of shares need to be normalized. There may also be restricted non-trading shares to be considered. Using data without understanding its provenance is silly. Comparing data from two disparate data sources is just comparing apples with oranges.
Everything is easy until it's complicated. Unfortunately the equities market is often complicated and free information is worth as much value as the price you pay for it.
Your best bet to find out exactly what the amount of shares and what different classes of stock a company has, is by looking at the SEC's database directly. You can use http://edgar.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html, and lookup the latest 10-Q report. The cover page should show the info as to how many outstanding shares per class of stock a company has, and is usually considered to be the latest best-known value available to the public. GOOGLE for example, has this latest info: Class A Common Stock Document Information [Line Items] Entity Common Stock, Shares Outstanding 288,264,671 Class B Common Stock Document Information [Line Items] Entity Common Stock, Shares Outstanding 52,452,377 Class C Capital Stock Document Information [Line Items] Entity Common Stock, Shares Outstanding 341,692,317