Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

What's the difference between Market Cap and NAV?
I think the key concept here is future value.  The NAV is essentially a book-keeping exercise- you add up all the assets and remove all the liabilities.  For a public company this is spelled out in the balance sheet, and is generally listed at the bottom.  I pulled a recent one from Cisco Systems (because I used to work there and know the numbers  ;-) and you can see it here: roughly $56 billion... https://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=CSCO+Balance+Sheet&annual  Another way to think about it: In theory (and we know about this, right?) the NAV is what you would get if you liquidated the company instantaneously.  A definition I like to use for market cap is "the current assets, plus the perceived present value of all future earnings for the company"... so let's dissect that a little.  The term "present value" is really important, because a million dollars today is worth more than a million dollars next year.  A company expected to make a lot of money soon will be worth more (i.e. a higher market cap) than a company expected to make the same amount of money, but later.  The "all future earnings" part is exactly what it sounds like.  So again, following our cisco example, the current market cap is ~142 billion, which means that "the market" thinks they will earn about $85 billion over the life of the company (in present day dollars).