Why is Google's current nasdaq market cap almost twice the current share price * the No. of shares outstanding?
For each class A share (GOOGL) there's a class C share (GOOG), hence the missing half in your calculation. The almost comes from the slightly higher market price of the class A shares (due to them having voting powers) over class C (which have no voting powers). There's also class B share which is owned by the founders (Larry, Sergei, Eric and perhaps some to Stanford University and others) and differs from class A by the voting power. These are not publicly traded. http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/economix/2014/04/02/the-many-classes-of-google-stock/ Are you counting both class A and other share classes?
"This could be another reason.  ""Companies buy their own stock in the market place to reduce the number of shares outstanding, and thus boosts the earnings per share. It also boosts the stock price, which benefits management that has stock options. "" Taken from this article. http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2014/01/06/the-most-reliable-indicator-of-an-approaching-market-top/ and this article ""Why are stock rising?"" may help as well.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2013/12/23/why-are-stocks-rising/" Put options are contracts to sell. You pay me a fee for the right to put the stock (or other underlying security) in my hands if you want to. That happens on a specific date (the strike date) and a specified price (the strike price). You can decide not to exercise that right, but I must follow through and let you sell it to me if you want to. Put options can be used by the purchaser to cap losses. For example: You purchase a PUT option for GE Oct19 13.00 from me. On October 19th, you can make me let you sell your GE stock to me for $13.00 a share. If the price for GE has fallen to $12.00, that would be a good idea. If its now at $15.00 a share, you will probably keep the GE or sell it at the current market price. Call options are contracts to buy. The same idea only in the other direction: You pay me a fee for the right to call the stock away from me. Calls also have a strike date and strike price. Like a put, you can choose not to exercises it. You can choose to buy the stock from me (on the strike date for the strike price), but I have to let you buy it from me if you want to.  For example: You purchase a CALL option for GE Oct19 16.00 option from me. On October 19th, you can buy my GE stock from me for $16.00 a share. If the current price is $17.50, you should make me let you buy if from me for $16.00. If its less than $16.00, you could by it at the current market price for less. Commonly, options are for a block of 100 shares of the underlying security. Note: this is a general description. Options can be very complicated. The fee you pay for the option and the transaction fees associated with the shares affects whether or not exercising is financially beneficial. Options can be VERY RISKY. You can loose all your money as there is no innate value in the option, only how it relates to the underlying security. Before your brokerage will let you trade, there are disclosures you must read and affirm that you understand the risk. "First a quick terminology correction: I believe you're proposing selling 10,000 shares of the stock of a company, not ""10,000 stocks"". When you sell, you need to decide whether you're selling for a specific minimum price or just selling for whatever price you can get. If you set a specific lower limit on asking price, then if people aren't interested at that price it doesn't sell. Which may mean you sell only a few shares, or none if your asking price isn't considered reasonable. If you want to sell independent of price, then as you begin to flood the market with your shares, the price you get per additional share may decline until it finds a buyer. What that lower limit is will depend on what people think the stock is currently worth. This is one of the many complications I don't want to deal with, which is why I stick with index funds." "The goal is to understand the movements of the market as a whole and understand the fortunes of every investor in the S&amp;P.  As for why it isn't price-weighted, it is because price is a complely arbitrary notion, whereas market cap is at least ""real"" in some sense.  Imagine Berkshire Hathaway vs Apple. In the S&amp;P, Apple takes up about 75% more of the index because it's market cap is 796B, compared to 452B for Berkshire. This makes intuitive sense. Apple is ""worth"" 75% more, so it takes up that much more of the index.  Now lets look at price. In a price weighted index of only those two stocks, Apple, with a stock price of 154.12 would take up .06% compared to Berkshire Hathaway at 99.94% due to its 274,740 stock price. The only difference is Apple has WAY more shares outstanding. Nothing of economic value (other than a bit of liquidity) is captured in a price-weighted index." "The answer to your question has to do with the an explanation of ""shares authorized, issued and outstanding."" Companies, in their Articles of Incorporation, specify a maximum number of shares they are authorized to issue. For example purposes let's assume Facebook is authorized to issue 100 shares. Let's pretend they have actually issued 75 shares, but only 50 are outstanding (aka Float, i.e. freely trading stock in the market) and stock options total 25 shares. So if someone owns 1 share, what percentage of Facebook do they own? You might think 1/100, or 1%; you might think 1/75, or 1.3%; or you might think 1/50, or 2%.  2% is the answer, but only on a NON-diluted basis. So today someone who owns 1 share owns 2% of Facebook. Tomorrow Facebook announces they just issued 15 shares to Whatsapp to buy the company.  Now there are 65 shares outstanding and 90 issued. Now someone who owns 1 share of Facebook own only 1/65, or 1.5% (down from 2%)! P.S. ""Valuation"" can be thought of as the price of the stock at the time of the purchase announcement." It seems like you want to compare the company's values not necessarily the stock price.  Why not get the total outstanding shares and the stock price, generate the market cap.  Then you could compare changes to market cap rather than just share price. It is ALWAYS possible for a company's valuation in the market to be larger than the market it serves, and in fact it is not uncommon.  There's valid argument that Uber would be a good example of this, with a market cap of more than $60 billion.  Market cap is the total value of all shares outstanding.  Keep in mind that what a company's shares  trade for is less a reflection of its past (or, to some degree, even present) revenue activity and more of a speculative bet on what the company will do in the future. That's a very good question.. of which I didn't know the answer. I didn't pay very close attention when they actually IPO'ed, so I researched just now and I couldn't believe the amount of public complaining the banks did about Google's IPO structure. Hilarious in retrospect.   Either way, in a very satisfying development, Google only paid 3% on the underwrite. The offering was worth almost $3B which means $100m for the banks, but they didn't have to do a road show or make a single call to sell the thing, so I'd say that was more than fair.  {[Source](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2004/07/frugal_google.html)}  &gt;Google's IPO price will thus be set naturally by all interested market participants, not artificially by underwriters. Google—and not well-connected investors—will receive the full benefit of investors' enthusiasm for the stock. To add insult to the injury of the chastened investment bankers, Google has decreed that it'll only pay a 3 percent underwriting fee.