What forms (S-1, 8-K, etc) and keywords in news headlines signify dilution?
Possibles: stock offering, secondary placement, increase authorized number of shares, shelf registration.
This is such an annoying alarmist article. With the Whole Foods acquisition Amazon makes up like 1.4% of the grocery market. This article is talking in greater terms but I don't see the threat. Certainly not enough of a threat to justify this click-baity title. Everyone calm down. It seems that any news article headline that includes a dollar amount or a percentage is click bait. In the best cases they're sensationalizing a mundane study. In the worst cases the study is as flawed as the headline. In either case the liberal arts major has their revenge on the world. "Because it was never about what's in it.  It was ""outrage journalism"" against something fairly innocuous.  The story was ""Moms!  Look at this gross thing they're feeding your kids!""  I'm all about knowing what is in your food.  This was completely innocuous though. 700 people lost their jobs and a person's company and life's work was nearly destroyed.  http://time.com/5978/one-year-later-the-makers-of-pink-slime-are-hanging-on-and-fighting-back/  That is not OK." Generally, when I run across this kind of situation, I look for the Investor Relations section of the corporate website for a 'Stock Information' (or similar) tab or link.   This usually contains information explaining the different shares classes, how they relate (if at all), voting and/or dividend rights, and taxation differences for the different classes. However, I have trouble finding such a page on a central BYD corporate investor relations page.   I did find this page detailing the HK1211 shares: http://www.byd.com/investor/base_information.html.  I don't know what or why, but something tells me this is an older page. Searching on, I also found this page which looks newer and clarifies that the difference you are seeing is between 'A' and 'H' shares. http://www.byd.cn/BYDEnglish/basic/article.jsp?articleId=1524676.  (I'm guessing but I'd think somewhere in the announcements on this byd.cn site, you may find more details of any structural differences between share classes -- I just didn't want to page through them all.) You can calculate the fully diluted shares by comparing EPS vs diluted (adjusted) EPS as reported in 10K. I don't believe they report the number directly, but it is a trivial math exercise to reach it. The do report outstanding common stock (basis for EPS). "Remember that in most news outlets journalists do not get to pick the titles of their articles.  That's up to the editor.  So even though the article was primarily about ETFs, the reporter made the mistake of including some tangential references to mutual funds.  The editor then saw that the article talked about ETFs and mutual funds and -- knowing even less about the subject matter than the reporter, but recognizing that more readers' eyeballs would be attracted to a headline about mutual funds than to a headline about ETFs -- went with the ""shocking"" headline about the former. In any case, as you already pointed out, ETFs need to know their value throughout the day, as do the investors in that ETF.  Even momentary outages of price sources can be disastrous. Although mutual funds do not generally make transactions throughout the day, and fund investors are not typically interested in the fund's NAV more than once per day, the fund managers don't just sit around all day doing nothing and then press a couple buttons before the market closes.  They do watch their NAV very closely during the day and think very carefully about which buttons to press at the end of the day.  If their source of stock price data goes offline, then they're impacted almost as severely as -- if less visibly than -- an ETF. Asking Yahoo for prices seems straightforward, but (1) you get what you pay for, and (2) these fund companies are built on massive automated infrastructures that expect to receive their data from a certain source in a certain way at a certain time.  (And they pay a lot of money in order to be able to expect that.)  It would be quite difficult to just feed in manual data, although in the end I suspect some of these companies did just that.  Either they fell back to a secondary data supplier, or they manually constructed datasets for their programs to consume." Matt Levine talked about a cute scam that this resembles, a kind of extended short squeeze. You manipulate up the stock of a company, so that it's obviously way above the fundamental value. Word will get out. Then the shorts come in. But the value remains stubbornly high. All the stock is held by a few insiders, but they didn't manipulate the stock price to do a pump and dump. They did it to milk the shorts on borrow cost. There could also be some degree of dilution at play here. If they are rapidly expanding and hiring, or if they took on another round of funding each share may have a lower amount of value though the company might be worth more than they were previously. The newly issued options may also be of a different class. I believe, I could be wrong, it has been a long day. By exercising this right you have the right to purchase the equivalent of their current share.  Eg. Someone owns 50 of 100 shares. and the company does a rights offering and is expanding the shares to 200. That person has first right to purchase 50 more shares to keep his share from being diluted. The 10-K language is very specific. And as someone that has worked w/ securities attorneys to write these things, I know it is worded like that for a reason. Regardless, to have that risk factor in there and not disclose executives leaving is really shoddy disclosure. News-driven investors tend to be very short-term focussed investors. They often trade by using index futures (on the S&P 500 index for instance). "No, but it's serving the same purpose, which is to hide the original origin of a sum of money. Both examples involve moving money from one source to another, when both the source and the sink are in actuality the same entity managed and run by the same people. Both involve doing it in order to hide the money from those who would otherwise have a right to a portion of it. In this case, it is those with a right on the ""net"". In Starbucks UK, it's the UK government." "Interesting article! I feel like it focuses a little heavy on that line in the 10-K though, that doesn't seem terribly uncommon. Seems like the article is trying to do a ""gotcha"" bit with it. I think the story of the disappearing executives is much more interesting without bringing the generic 10-K disclaimers into it at all." "Morningstar's definition of cash includes ""cash equivalents (fixed-income securities with a maturity of one year or less)"". So I'm guessing 81% of its holdings are short-term enough to fall into this category." The term pink slime wasn't coined by the reporters. It was the name given to it by the whistleblowing USDA scientists in a 2002 email to colleagues. The term was part of the story itself.  &gt; In fact, the term “pink slime” was coined by one of the segment’s whistleblowing USDA scientists in a 2002 email to colleagues, and a 2009 New York Times piece using the term to describe BPI’s meat product won a Pulitzer Prize.