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 is from Google Finance right now. How is it possible that a publicly traded investment company's net asset value per share is higher than their share price? Wouldn't you (in theory) be able to buy the company and liquidate it to make a profit of (NAV/share - price/share)*number of shares, ignoring transaction costs and such?   I realize that since part of their portfolio is in private equity, NAV is hard to calculate and hard to liquidate as well, but it doesn't really seem to make sense to me. Would love some input.   The company I'm talking about in this instance is 180 Degree Capital Corp, but this isn't the first time I've seen this. For the lazy, Wikipedia says: The term microcap stock (also micro-cap) refers to the stock of public companies in the United States which have a market capitalization of roughly $300 million or less. The shares of companies with a market capitalization of less than $50 million are typically referred to as nano-cap stocks.  Many micro-cap and nano-cap stocks are traded over-the-counter with their prices quoted on the OTCBB or the Pink Sheets. A few of the larger, more established microcaps are listed on the NASDAQ Capital Market or American Stock Exchange (AMEX).  Micro-cap and especially nano-cap stocks are notorious for their volatility. A high percentage of these companies fail to execute their business plans and go out of business. Fraud and market manipulation are not uncommon, and the transactions costs in trading can be quite high. Pricing is more likely to be inefficient, since fewer institutional investors and analysts operate in this space, due to the relatively small dollar amounts involved and the lack of liquidity. In order to see whether you can buy or sell some given quantity of a stock at the current bid price, you need a counterparty (a buyer) who is willing to buy the number of stocks you are wishing to offload. To see whether such a counterparty exists, you can look at the stock's order book, or level two feed. The order book shows all the people who have placed buy or sell orders, the price they are willing to pay, and the quantity they demand at that price. Here is the order book from earlier this morning for the British pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline PLC.  Let's start by looking at the left-hand blue part of the book, beneath the yellow strip. This is called the Buy side. The book is sorted with the highest price at the top, because this is the best price that a seller can presently obtain. If several buyers bid at the same price, then the oldest entry on the book takes precedence. You can see we have five buyers each willing to pay 1543.0 p (that's 1543 British pence, or £15.43) per share. Therefore the current bid price for this instrument is 1543.0. The first buyer wants 175 shares, the next, 300, and so on. The total volume that is demanded at 1543.0p is 2435 shares. This information is summarized on the yellow strip: 5 buyers, total volume of 2435, at 1543.0. These are all buyers who want to buy right now and the exchange will make the trade happen immediately if you put in a sell order for 1543.0 p or less. If you want to sell 2435 shares or fewer, you are good to go. The important thing to note is that once you sell these bidders a total of 2435 shares, then their orders are fulfilled and they will be removed from the order book. At this point, the next bidder is promoted up the book; but his price is 1542.5, 0.5 p lower than before. Absent any further changes to the order book, the bid price will decrease to 1542.5 p. This makes sense because you are selling a lot of shares so you'd expect the market price to be depressed. This information will be disseminated to the level one feed and the level one graph of the stock price will be updated. Thus if you have more than 2435 shares to sell, you cannot expect to execute your order at the bid price in one go. Of course, the more shares you are trying to get rid of, the further down the buy side you will have to go. In reality for a highly liquid stock as this, the order book receives many amendments per second and it is unlikely that your trade would make much difference. On the right hand side of the display you can see the recent trades: these are the times the trades were done (or notified to the exchange), the price of the trade, the volume and the trade type (AT means automatic trade).  GlaxoSmithKline is a highly liquid stock with many willing buyers and sellers. But some stocks are less liquid. In order to enable traders to find a counterparty at short notice, exchanges often require less liquid stocks to have market makers. A market maker places buy and sell orders simultaneously, with a spread between the two prices so that they can profit from each transaction. For instance Diurnal Group PLC has had no trades today and no quotes. It has a more complicated order book, enabling both ordinary buyers and sellers to list if they wish, but market makers are separated out at the top. Here you can see that three market makers are providing liquidity on this stock, Peel Hunt (PEEL), Numis (NUMS) and Winterflood (WINS). They have a very unpalatable spread of over 5% between their bid and offer prices. Further in each case the sum total that they are willing to trade is 3000 shares. If you have more than three thousand Dirunal Group shares to sell, you would have to wait for the market makers to come back with a new quote after you'd sold the first 3000. Even with non-voting shares, you own a portion of the company including all of its assets and its future profits.  If the company is sold, goes out of business and liquidates, etc., those with non-voting shares still stand collect their share of the funds generated.  There's also the possibility, as one of the comments notes, that a company will pay dividends in the future and distribute its assets to shareholders that way. The example of Google (also mentioned in the comments) is interesting because when they went to voting and non-voting stock, there was some theoretical debate about whether the two types of shares (GOOG and GOOGL) would track each other in value.  It turned out that they did not - People did put a premium on voting, so that is worth something.  Even without the voting rights, however, Google has massive assets and each share (GOOG and GOOGL) represented ownership of a fraction of those assets and that kept them highly correlated in value.  (Google had to pay restitution to some shareholders of the non-voting stock as a result of the deviation in value. I won't get into the details here since it's a bit of tangent, but you could easily find details on the web.) Dividends would be a possible factor you are ignoring.  If Dell has another quarter or two to pay out dividends that could account for some of the difference there. I don't think there is a confirmed date of when the deal is done yet other than around the end of Dell's second quarter which was in the LA Times link you cited. There is also the potential for the terms of the deal to be revised that is another possibility here.  Have you examined other deals where a public company went private to see how the stock performed in the last few months before the deal closed? Market Capitalization is the equity value of a company. It measures the total value of the shares available for trade in public markets if they were immediately sold at the last traded market price. Some people think it is a measure of a company's net worth, but it can be a misleading for a number of reasons. Share price will be biased toward recent earnings and the Earnings Per Share (EPS) metric. The most recent market price only reflects the lowest price one market participant is willing to sell for and the highest price another market participant is willing to buy for, though in a liquid market it does generally reflect the current consensus. In an imperfect market (for example with a large institutional purchase or sale) prices can diverge widely from the consensus price and when multiplied by outstanding shares, can show a very distorted market capitalization. It is also a misleading number when comparing two companies' market capitalization because while some companies raise the money they need by selling shares on the markets, others might prefer debt financing from private lenders or sell bonds on the market, or some other capital structure. Some companies sell preferred shares or non-voting shares along with the traditional shares that exist. All of these factors have to be considered when valuing a company. Large-cap companies tend to have lower but more stable growth than small cap companies which are still expanding into new markets because of their smaller size. "No, a jump in market capitalization does not equal the amount that has been invested.  Market cap is simply the stock price times the total number of shares. This represents a theoretical value of the company. I say ""theoretical"" because the company might not be able to be sold for that at all.  The quoted stock price is simply what the last buyer and seller of stock agreed upon for the price of their trade. They really only represent themselves; other investors may decide that the stock is worth more or less than that.  The stock price can move on very little volume. In this case, Amazon had released a very good earnings report after the bell yesterday, and the price jumped in after hours trading. The stock price is up, but that simply means that the few shares traded overnight sold for much higher than the closing price yesterday.  After the market opens today and many more shares are traded, we'll get a better idea what large numbers of investors feel about the price. But no matter what the price does, the change in market cap does not equal the amount of new money being invested in the company. Market cap is the price of the most recent trades extrapolated out across all the shares." Take a look at apple.  It has no debt.  So the ev is basically mkt cap - cash.  Also remember market cap is the float * share price nothing else.  Obviously share price takes into account the assets of the firm into perpituituy but the way you phrased it, adding debt , didnt sound quite right to me.  We remove cash since someone buying a company isn't going to pay for your cash.  In the transaction cash is distributed to share holders then the company is sold. Yahoo's share price more than tripled under her watch. ($15.45 in July 2012 when she joined, $54.02 when she left). Contrast that to the previous 5 years where it was cut in half ($31 to $15 between 2007 and 2012). You have to go back 17 years to 2000 to find Yahoo being at the $50+ mark again.  Microsoft has only doubled in the last 5 years, Google is up 3.5x which is slightly behind Yahoo as well.   Say what you want, but to stockholders, she has been good. There are kind of two answers here: the practical reason an acquirer has to pay more for shares than their current trading price and the economic justification for the increase in price. Why must the acquirer must pay a premium as a practical matter?  Everyone has a different valuation of a company.  The current trading price is the lowest price that any holder of the stock is willing to sell a little bit of stock for and the highest that anyone is willing to buy a little bit for. However, Microsoft needs to buy a controlling share.  To do this on the open market they would need to buy all the shares from people who's personal valuation is low, and then a bunch from people whose valuation is higher and so on.  The act of buying that much stock would push the price up by buying all the shares from people who are really willing to sell.  Moreover, as they buy more and more, the remaining people increase their personal valuation so the price would really shoot up.  Acquirers avoid this situation by offering to buy a ton of stock at a substantially higher, single price. Why is Linkedin suddenly worth more than it was yesterday? Microsoft is expecting to be able to use its own infrastructure and tools to make more money with Linkedin than Linkedin would have before.  In other words, they believe that the Linkedin division of Microsoft after the merger will be worth more than Linkedin alone was before the merger.  This synergistic idea is the theoretical foundation for mergers in general and the main reason people use to argue for a higher price. You could also argue that by expressing an interest in Linkedin, Microsoft may be telling us something it knows about Linkedin's value that maybe we didn't realize before because we aren't as smart and informed as the people on Microsoft's board.  But since it's Microsoft that's doing the buying in this case, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is not the main effect.  Given Microsoft's history, the idea that they buy expensive things because they have money to burn is more compelling than the idea that they have an insight into a company's value that we don't. 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). Market cap should be share price times number of shares, right? That's several orders of magnitude right there... "Market cap is the current value of a company's equity and is defined as the current share price multiplied by the number of shares. Please check also ""enterprise value"" for another definition of a company`s total value (enterprise value = market cap adjusted for net nebt). Regarding the second part of your question: Issuing new shares usually does not affect market cap in a significant way because the newly issued shares often result in lower share prices and dilution of the existing share holders shares." There is no one answer to this question, but there are some generalities. Most exchanges make a distinction between the passive and the aggressive sides of a trade.  The passive participant is the order that was resting on the market at the time of the trade.  It is an order that based on its price was not executable at the time, and therefore goes into the order book.  For example, I'm willing to sell 100 shares of a stock at $9.98 but nobody wants to buy that right now, so it remains as an open order on the exchange. Then somebody comes along and is willing to meet my price (I am glossing over lots of details here).  So they aggressively take out my order by either posting a market-buy, or specifically that they want to buy 100 shares at either $9.98, or at some higher price. Most exchanges will actually give me, as the passive (i.e. liquidity making) investor a small rebate, while the other person is charged a few fractions of a cent.  Google found NYSEArca details, and most other exchanges make their fees public as well.  As of this writing the generic price charged/credited: But they provide volume discounts, and many of the larger deals do fall into another tier of volume, which provides a different price structure.