What's the most correct way to calculate market cap for multi-class companies?
From their 10-K pulled directly from Edgar:  As of October 22, 2015, there were 291,327,781 shares of Alphabet   Inc.’s (the successor issuer pursuant to Rule 12g-3(a) under the   Exchange Act as of October 2, 2015) (Alphabet) Class A common stock   outstanding, 50,893,362 shares of Alphabet's Class B common stock   outstanding, and 345,504,021 Alphabet's Class C capital stock   outstanding. From here just do the math. The shares outstanding are listed on the first page of the 10-Q and 10-K reports. Edit: I believe Class B shares in this instance are not traded on the market and therefore would not be included. "Some companies issue multiple classes of shares.  Each share may have different ratios applied to ownership rights and voting rights.  Some shares classes are not traded on any exchange at all.  Some share classes have limited or no voting rights.   Voting rights ratios are not used when calculating market cap but the market typically puts a premium on shares with voting rights. Total market cap must include ALL classes of shares, listed or not, weighted according to thee ratios involved in the company's ownership structure.  Some are 1:1, but in the case of Berkshire Hathaway, Class B shares are set at an ownership level of 1/1500 of the Class A shares. In terms of Alphabet Inc, the following classes of shares exist as at 4 Dec 2015: When determining market cap, you should also be mindful of other classes of securities issued by the company, such as convertible debt instruments and stock options.  This is usually referred to as ""Fully Diluted"" assuming all such instruments are converted."
"In an IPO (initial public offering) or APO (additional public offering) situation, a small group of stakeholders (as few as one) basically decide to offer an additional number of ""shares"" of equity in the company. Usually, these ""shares"" are all equal; if you own one share you own a percentage of the company equal to that of anyone else who owns one share. The sum total of all shares, theoretically, equals the entire value of the company, and so with N shares in existence, one share is equivalent to 1/Nth the company, and entitles you to 1/Nth of the profits of the company, and more importantly to some, gives you a vote in company matters which carries a weight of 1/Nth of the entire shareholder body. Now, not all of these shares are public. Most companies have the majority (51%+) of shares owned by a small number of ""controlling interests"". These entities, usually founding owners or their families, may be prohibited by agreement from selling their shares on the open market (other controlling interests have right of first refusal). For ""private"" companies, ALL the shares are divided this way. For ""public"" companies, the remainder is available on the open market, and those shares can be bought and sold without involvement by the company. Buyers can't buy more shares than are available on the entire market. Now, when a company wants to make more money, a high share price at the time of the issue is always good, for two reasons. First, the company only makes money on the initial sale of a share of stock; once it's in a third party's hands, any profit from further sale of the stock goes to the seller, not the company. So, it does little good to the company for its share price to soar a month after its issue; the company's already made its money from selling the stock. If the company knew that its shares would be in higher demand in a month, it should have waited, because it could have raised the same amount of money by selling fewer shares. Second, the price of a stock is based on its demand in the market, and a key component of that is scarcity; the fewer shares of a company that are available, the more they'll cost. When a company issues more stock, there's more shares available, so people can get all they want and the demand drops, taking the share price with it. When there's more shares, each share (being a smaller percentage of the company) earns less in dividends as well, which figures into several key metrics for determining whether to buy or sell stock, like earnings per share and price/earnings ratio. Now, you also asked about ""dilution"". That's pretty straightforward. By adding more shares of stock to the overall pool, you increase that denominator; each share becomes a smaller percentage of the company. The ""privately-held"" stocks are reduced in the same way. The problem with simply adding stocks to the open market, getting their initial purchase price, is that a larger overall percentage of the company is now on the open market, meaning the ""controlling interests"" have less control of their company. If at any time the majority of shares are not owned by the controlling interests, then even if they all agree to vote a certain way (for instance, whether or not to merge assets with another company) another entity could buy all the public shares (or convince all existing public shareholders of their point of view) and overrule them. There are various ways to avoid this. The most common is to issue multiple types of stock. Typically, ""common"" stock carries equal voting rights and equal shares of profits. ""Preferred stock"" typically trades a higher share of earnings for no voting rights. A company may therefore keep all the ""common"" stock in private hands and offer only preferred stock on the market. There are other ways to ""class"" stocks, most of which have a similar tradeoff between earnings percentage and voting percentage (typically by balancing these two you normalize the price of stocks; if one stock had better dividends and more voting weight than another, the other stock would be near-worthless), but companies may create and issue ""superstock"" to controlling interests to guarantee both profits and control. You'll never see a ""superstock"" on the open market; where they exist, they are very closely held. But, if a company issues ""superstock"", the market will see that and the price of their publicly-available ""common stock"" will depreciate sharply. Another common way to increase market cap without diluting shares is simply to create more shares than you issue publicly; the remainder goes to the current controlling interests. When Facebook solicited outside investment (before it went public), that's basically what happened; the original founders were issued additional shares to maintain controlling interests (though not as significant), balancing the issue of new shares to the investors. The ""ideal"" form of this is a ""stock split""; the company simply multiplies the number of shares it has outstanding by X, and issues X-1 additional shares to each current holder of one share. This effectively divides the price of one share by X, lowering the barrier to purchase a share and thus hopefully driving up demand for the shares overall by making it easier for the average Joe Investor to get their foot in the door. However, issuing shares to controlling interests increases the total number of shares available, decreasing the market value of public shares that much more and reducing the amount of money the company can make from the stock offering." "A stock, at its most basic, is worth exactly what someone else will pay to buy it right now (or in the near future), just like anything else of value. However, what someone's willing to pay for it is typically based on what the person can get from it. There are a couple of ways to value a stock. The first way is on expected earnings per share, most of would normally (but not always) be paid in dividends. This is a metric that can be calculated based on the most recently reported earnings, and can be estimated based on news about the company or the industry its in (or those of suppliers, likely buyers, etc) to predict future earnings. Let's say the stock price is exactly $100 right now, and you buy one share. In one quarter, the company is expected to pay out $2 per share in dividends. That is a 2% ROI realized in 3 months. If you took that $2 and blew it on... coffee, maybe, or you stuffed it in your mattress, you'd realize a total gain of $8 in one year, or in ROI terms an annual rate of 8%. However, if you reinvested the money, you'd be making money on that money, and would have a little more. You can calculate the exact percentage using the ""future value"" formula. Conversely, if you wanted to know what you should pay, given this level of earnings per share, to realize a given rate of return, you can use the ""present value"" formula. If you wanted a 9% return on your money, you'd pay less for the stock than its current value, all other things being equal. Vice-versa if you were happy with a lesser rate of return. The current rate of return based on stock price and current earnings is what the market as a whole is willing to tolerate. This is how bonds are valued, based on a desired rate of return by the market, and it also works for stocks, with the caveat that the dividends, and what you'll get back at the ""end"", are no longer constant as they are with a bond. Now, in your case, the company doesn't pay dividends. Ever. It simply retains all the earnings it's ever made, reinvesting them into doing new things or more things. By the above method, the rate of return from dividends alone is zero, and so the future value of your investment is whatever you paid for it. People don't like it when the best case for their money is that it just sits there. However, there's another way to think of the stock's value, which is it's more core definition; a share of the company itself. If the company is profitable, and keeps all this profit, then a share of the company equals, in part, a share of that retained earnings. This is very simplistic, but if the company's assets are worth 1 billion dollars, and it has one hundred million shares of stock, each share of stock is worth $10, because that's the value of that fraction of the company as divided up among all outstanding shares. If the company then reports earnings of $100 million, the value of the company is now 1.1 billion, and its stock should go up to $11 per share, because that's the new value of one ten-millionth of the company's value. Your ROI on this stock is $1, in whatever time period the reporting happens (typically quarterly, giving this stock a roughly 4% APY). This is a totally valid way to value stocks and to shop for them; it's very similar to how commodities, for instance gold, are bought and sold. Gold never pays you dividends. Doesn't give you voting rights either. Its value at any given time is solely what someone else will pay to have it. That's just fine with a lot of people right now; gold's currently trading at around $1,700 an ounce, and it's been the biggest moneymaker in our economy since the bottom fell out of the housing market (if you'd bought gold in 2008, you would have more than doubled your money in 4 years; I challenge you to find anything else that's done nearly as well over the same time). In reality, a combination of both of these valuation methods are used to value stocks. If a stock pays dividends, then each person gets money now, but because there's less retained earnings and thus less change in the total asset value of the company, the actual share price doesn't move (much). If a stock doesn't pay dividends, then people only get money when they cash out the actual stock, but if the company is profitable (Apple, BH, etc) then one share should grow in value as the value of that small fraction of the company continues to grow. Both of these are sources of ROI, and both are seen in a company that will both retain some earnings and pay out dividends on the rest." "Market cap doesn't mean that much money went into the system. Money in equals money out over time, and is not directly tied to market cap, which can actually be lower if price drops far enough. These concepts are the same for all traded assets, such as stocks, bonds, and commodities. ""Market cap"" is simply the current price times the number of shares available in the market. So a $300 billion market cap does not mean $300 billion was paid to somebody to buy it all. Instead, what's happened is that some money went in at first, but much much less, and then price increased.  Bitcoin is a little different in that ""money in"" for many innovators and early adopters was in the form of time spent and contributing to the network (what they call mining). 1 Now, as to the price jump, that's an effect of market forces. For many reasons, the market has clamored to buy bitcoin over the last year 2, but many already holding bitcoin weren't ready to sell. Supply and demand worked in a way that increased price. Supply low, demand high, price increases.  This situation could easily reverse. Just as suddenly as the market wanted bitcoin it can decide it doesn't want bitcoin. Supply and demand would work in a way that would decrease price. Supply high, demand low, price decreases.  This kind of massive market price movement in this short timeframe is exactly what traders mean by ""volatile"". It's actually not that unusual, it's just that most stocks and other assets that experience such gains don't get much media attention. Further, gains like this often reflect ""inflated"" prices, market ""euphoria"", and trading ""bubbles"". All of these terms essentially mean ""price will correct (go down) eventually, because price is currently much higher than actual value"".  If the market loses all faith in the asset, price will drop to zero and the ""money in equals money out"" maxim breaks down. Some traders will be left ""holding the bag"",  meaning they owned the stock at the moment trading permanently ceased. 3 NOTES: Exact reasons cannot be pinpointed with facts. Instead, we enter the realm of opinion on this point. In my opinion, bitcoin has increased massively in value mostly due to the media attention it has received. And this media attention is not new. It received equally pervasive attention in 2013. As an effect, price went from under $100 to over $1000 back to under $200 in about 20 months. It's great news if you're a trader. You could have made tons of money. As for the early bitcoiners, it was actually kind of annoying because it then brought in all the skeptics calling it a ""ponzi"" scheme or ""pyramid"" scheme, despite the quite obvious fact that bitcoin cannot be either by definition. Further upward market forces may have come from the fact that bitcoin is built on an innovative technology that may very well change the way we do a lot of things in the future. I'm referring to ""blockchain"". This effect can be seen in several failing companies rising from the darkness like Valkrie simply by adding the work blockchain to their name. I personally find this exactly analogous to the ""dot com bubble"", where companies in the late 1990's made millions in stock selloffs simply by adding "".com"" to their name, despite having no profits or sometimes not even a working product. For high volatility stocks, this is not unusual. Many ""penny stocks"" fail, and typically the road down is faster than the road up. Bitcoin may indeed fail, but again, it's a bit different than a stock. Bitcoin is not a company. There's no financials for Bitcoin, no VC investors, board members to report to, no product to produce, etc. Bitcoin is designed to simply be a thing itself. The hope is to disrupt currency and commodity markets and create a new ""store of value."" Literally, Bitcoin is designed to have intrinsic value. Whether it's actually working at this point is still unknown." "When you look at those results you'll see that it lists the actual market cap for the stocks.  The ones on the biggest price move are usually close the the $1B capitalization cut-off that they use. (The don't report anything with less than $1B in capitalization on these lists.)  The ones on the biggest market cap are much larger companies. So, the answer is that a 40% change in price on a company that has $1B capitalization will be a $400M change in market cap.  A 4% change on a company with $100B capitalization will be a $4B change in market cap.  The one that moved 40% will make the ""price"" list but not the market cap list and vice versa." "Their algorithm may be different (and proprietary), but how I would to it is to assume that daily changes in the stock are distributed normally (meaning the probability distribution is a ""bell curve"" - the green area in your chart).  I would then calculate the average and standard deviation (volatility) of historical returns to determine the center and width of the bell curve (calibrating it to expected returns and implied volaility based on option prices), then use standard formulas for lognormal distributions to calculate the probability of the price exceeding the strike price. So there are many assumptions involved, and in the end it's just a probability, so there's no way to know if it's right or wrong - either the stock will cross the strike or it won't." "There are some assumptions which can be made in terms of the flexibility you have - I will start with the least flexible assumption and then move to more flexible assumptions. If you must put down a number 1, your go-to for this(""Change the start period to 1""), is pretty good, and it's used frequently for other divide-by-zero calculations like kda in a video game. The problem I have with '1' is that it doesn't allow you to handle various scales.  Some problems are dealt with in thousands, some in fractions, and some in hundreds of millions. Therefore, you should change the start period to the smallest significantly measurable number you could reasonably have. Here, that would take your example 0 and 896 and give you an increase of 89,500%. It's not a great result, but it's the best you can hope for if you have to put down a number,  and it allows you to keep some of the ""meaning in the change."" If you absolutely must put something This is the assumption that most answers have taken - you can put down a symbol, a number with a notation, empty space, etc, but there is going to be a label somewhere called 'Growth' that will exist. I generally agree with what I've seen, particularly the answers from Benjamin Cuninghma and Nath. For the sake of preservation - those answers can be summarized as putting 'N/A' or '-', possibly with a footnote and asterisk. If you can avoid the measurement entirely The root of your question is ""What do my manager and investors expect to see?"" I think it's valuable to dig even further to ""What do my manager and investors really want to know?"". They want to know the state of their investment. Growth is often a good measurement of that state, but in cases where you are starting from zero or negative, it just doesn't tell you the right information. In these situations, you should avoid % growth, and instead talk in absolute terms which mention the time frame or starting state. For example:" "Market caps is just the share price, multiplied by the number of shares. It doesn't represent any value (if people decide to pay more or less for the shares, the market cap goes up or down). It does represent what people think the company is worth.  NAV sounds very much like book value. It basically says ""how much cash would we end up with if we sold everything the company owns, paid back all the debt, and closed down the business? "" Since closing down the business is rarely a good idea, this underestimates the value of the business enormously. Take a hairdresser who owns nothing but a pair of scissors, but has a huge number of repeat customers, charges $200 for a haircut, and makes tons of money every year. The business has a huge value, but NAV = price of one pair of used scissors." Your question is a complex one because knowledge of the investor's beliefs about the market is required.  For almost any quantitative portfolio, one must have a good estimate of the expected return vector and covariance matrix of the assets in question.  The expected return vector, in particular, is far from estimable.  No one agrees on it and there is no way to know who is right and who is wrong. In a world satisfying the conditions of the CAPM, you can bypass this problem because the main implication of the CAPM is that the market weights are optimal.  In that case the answer to your question is that you should determine the market weights of the various assets and use those along with saving in a risk-free account or borrowing, depending on your risk tolerance.  This portfolio has the added benefit that you don't need to rebalance much...the weights in your portfolio adjust at the same rate as the market weights. Any portfolio that has something besides this also includes some notion of expected return aside from CAPM fair pricing.  The question for you, then, is whether you have such a notion.  If you do, you can mix your information with the market weights to come up with a portfolio.  This is what the Black-Litterman method does, for example: get the expected return vector implied by market weights and the covariance matrix, mix with your expected return vector, then use mean-variance optimization to come up with your final weights.