Where Can The Fully Diluted Outstanding Shares Of A Company Be Found?
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).
This is in the balance sheet, but the info is not usually that detailed. It is safe to assume that at least some portion of the cash/cash equivalents will be in liquid bonds. You may find more specific details in the company SEC filings (annual reports etc). I think you're looking for the public float: Public float or the unqualified term may also refer to the number of   outstanding shares in the hands of public investors as opposed to   company officers, directors, or controlling-interest investors.   Assuming the insider held shares are not traded, these shares are the   publicly traded ones. The float is calculated by subtracting   restricted shares from outstanding shares. As mentioned, Treasury stock is probably the most narrow definition of restricted stock (not publicly traded), but shares held by corporate officers or majority investors are often included in the definition as well. In any case, the balance sheet is indeed a good place to start. When Hewlett Packard split they changed their name to HP Inc. and spun off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a new corporation. This means HP Inc. has the same stock history and ticker (HPQ) as Hewlett Packard did so that's the one you want to search for. As you noticed this also means it's impossible to search for old Hewlett Packard's stock performance alone. One free service that seems to show the unadjusted historical stock price of HPQ is Google finance: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AHPQ I already know of this method. I was creating a peer group and found 4-5 very similar companies, however one of them is a foreign public company with a subsidiary competing directly with a company I am trying to find the beta for. I guess I have to omit this company because it's strictly foreign?   Also, what do I do if I can't find any public companies that are similar to the company I am trying to value? A lot will depend on wether you have in your possession the physical share documents or just numbers in your brokerage portfolio. Electronic shares are not traceable as they do not exist as individual entities. ETrade certainly knows who bought how much, but no concept of which ones. Lets say ET buys 1000 shares of Acme, their database looks like this: Now they sell 400 shares to Bob: Bob sells 200, Alice buys 100: ( skipped one transaction for brevity ) Did Alice get 100 shares out of ET's original 1000, or did she get 100 shares that were previously owned by Bob? Or 27 from ET and 73 from ET? Another, less exact way to picture the process is one share is 1ml of liquid. If you return 50ml to the pot it becomes indistinguishable from the rest. You need a source of delisted historical data.  Such data is typically only available from paid sources. According to my records 20 Feb 2006 was not a trading day - it was Preisdent's Day and the US exchanges were closed. The prior trading date to this was 17 Feb 2006 where the stock had the following data: Open: 14.40 High 14.46 Low 14.16 Close 14.32 Volume 1339800 (consolidated volume) Source: Symbol NVE-201312 within Premium Data US delisted stocks historical data set available from http://www.premiumdata.net/products/premiumdata/ushistorical.php Disclosure: I am a co-owner of Norgate / Premium Data. "You can see all the (millions) of trades per day for a US stock only if you purchase that data from the individual exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, ARCA, ...), from a commercial market data aggregator (Bloomberg, Axioma, ...), or from the Consolidated Tape Association.  In none of that data will you ever find identifying information for the traders. What you are recalling regarding the names of ""people from the company"" trading company stock is related to SEC regulations stating that people with significant ownership of company stock and/or controlling positions on the company board of directors must publicize (most of) their trades in that stock.  That information can usually be found on the company's investor relations website, or through the SEC website." A public company should have a link for investor relations, which should help provide a trail of basis if this is a matter of company buyout, takeover, etc.  This gets you close, but if you don't have an exact date, it will just be close, not exact.  One clean way out of this, assuming the goal is to get rid of the stock and move on, is to donate the shares to charity. You will take the present value as a deduction, and be done. You can use a charitable gift fund such as those offered by Schwab or Fidelity, so if say, the shares are worth $20K, and you typically donate $5K per year, the fund lets you do this transaction at once, then send to the charities you wish over the next few years. "The main thing is the percentage of the company represented by the shares. Number of shares is meaningless without total shares. If you compute percentage and total company value you can estimate the value of the grant. Or perhaps more useful for a startup is to multiple the percentage by some plausible ""exit"" value, such as how much the company might sell for or IPO for. Many grants expire when or soon after you leave the company if you don't ""cash out"" vested shares when you leave, this is standard, but do remember it when you leave.  The other major thing is vesting. In the tech industry, vesting 1/4 after a year and then the rest quarterly over 3 more years is most common." Need help with a finance problem I'm currently facing in my business.  My company might be going through an acquisition and I need to understand how the dilution works out for shareholders.  They currently have large shareholder loans (debt), and will be converting to equity pre-transaction.  For this case, if the original company value = $1 MM and the SHL value = $1 MM, I'm assuming that'd dilute equity by 50% for all shareholders if converted to equity at original company value.  Correct?  However, what if the $1 MM in shareholder loans were converted at the market value of the company, say $4 MM?    I might be confusing myself, but just want to confirm.. thanks! The short answer, probably not much.  Unless you have a controlling interest in the company.  If at least 50%+1 of the shareholder votes are in favor of the dilution then it can be done.  There are some SEC rules that should protect against corporate looting and theft like what the Severin side is trying to make it appear as happened. However it would appear that Severin did something stupid.  He signed away all of his voting right to someone who would use them to make his rights basically worthless.  Had he kept his head in the game he could probably have saved himself.  But he didn't. If your average startup started issuing lots of stock and devaluing existing shares significantly then I would expect it would be harder to find investors willing to watch as their investment dwindled.  But if you are issuing a limited amount stock to get leverage to grow bigger then it is worth it.  In the .com bubble there were quite a few companies that just issued stock to buy other companies.  Eventually most of these companies got delisted because they diluted them selves to much when they were overvalued. Any company not just a startup can dilute its shares.  Many if not most major companies issue stock to raise capital.  This capital is then generally used to build the business further and increase the value of all shares.  Most of the time this dilution is very minor (<.1%) and has little if any impact on the stock.  There are rules that have to be followed as listed companies are regulated by the SEC.  There are less regulations with private corporations.  It looks like the dilution was combined with the buyout of the Florida company which probably contributed to the legality of the dilution.     With options they are generally issued at a set price.  This may be higher or lower than the reported sell price of the stock when the option is issued.  The idea is over time the stock will increase in value so that those people who hold on to their options can buy the stock for the price listed on the option.  I worked at an ISP start up in the 90's that made it pretty well.  I left before the options were issued but I had friends still there that were issued an option at $16 a share the value of the stock at the time of the issue of the option was about 12.  Well the company diluted the shares and used them to acquire more ISP's unfortunately this was about the time that DSL And cable internet took off so the dial up market tanked.  The value eventually fell to .10 they did a reverse split and when they did the called in all options.  The options did not have a positive cash value at any time.  Had RMI ever made it big then the options could have been worth millions.  There are some people from MS and Yahoo that were in early that made millions off of their options.  This became a popular way for startups to attract great talent paying peanuts.  They invested their time in the business hoping to strike gold.  A lot of IT people got burned so this is less popular among top talent as the primary compensation anymore. "For US equities, Edgar Online is where companies post their government filings to the SEC. On Google Finance, you would look at the ""SEC filings"" link on the page, and then find their 10K and 10Q documents, where that information is listed and already calculated. Many companies also have these same documents posted on their Investor Relations web pages." "Such data is typically only available from paid sources due to the amount of research involved in determining the identity of delisted securities, surviving entities in merger scenarios, company name changes, symbol changes, listing venue changes, research of all capital events such as splits, and to ensure that the data coverage is complete. Many stocks that are delisted from a major exchange due to financial difficulties are still publicly tradeable companies with their continuing to trade as ""OTC"" shares.  Some large companies even have periods where they traded for a period of their history as OTC.  This happened to NYSE:NAV (Navistar) from Feb 2007 to July 2008, where they were delisted due to accounting statement inaccuracies and auditor difficulties.   In the case of Macromedia, it was listed on NASDAQ 13 Dec 1993 and had its final day of trading on 2 Dec 2005.  It had one stock split (2:1) with ex-date of 16 Oct 1995 and no dividends were ever paid. Other companies are harder to find.  For example, the bankrupt General Motors (was NYSE:GM) became Motoros Liquidation Corp (OTC:MTLQQ) and traded that way for almost 21 months before finally delisting. In mergers, there are in two (or more) entities - one surviving entity and one (or more) delisted entity.  In demergers/spinoffs there are two (or more)  entities - one that continues the capital structure of the original company and the other newly formed spun-off entity.  Just using the names of the companies is no indication of its history. For example, due to monopoly considerations, AT&T were forced to spinoff multiple companies in 1984 and effectively became 75% smaller.  One of the companies they spunoff was Southwestern Bell Corporation, which became SBC Communications in 1995.  In 2005 SBC took over its former parent company and immediately changed its name to AT&T.  So now we have two AT&Ts - one that was delisted in 2005 and another that exists to this day. Disclosure: I am a co-owner of Norgate Data (Premium Data), a data vendor in this area." Stock dilution is legal because, in theory, the issuance of new shares shouldn't affect actual shareholder value. The other answers have explained fairly well why this is so. In practice, however, the issuance of new shares can destroy shareholder value. This normally happens when the issuing company:  In these cases, the issuance of more shares merely reduces each shareholder's stake in the company without building proportional shareholder value. "I think for this a picture is worth a thousand words.  This is a ""depth chart"" that I pulled from google images, specifically because it doesn't name any security.  On the left you have all of the ""bids"" to buy this security, on the right you have the ""asks"" to sell the security.  In the middle you have the bid/ask spread, this is the space between the highest bid and the lowest ask.  As you can see you are free to place you order to the market to buy for 232, and someone else is free to place their order to the market to sell for 234.  When the bid and the ask match there's a transaction for the maximum number of available shares.  Alternatively, someone can place a market order to buy or sell and they'll just take the current market price. Retail investors don't really get access to this kind of chart from their brokers because for the most part the information isn't terribly relevant at the retail level."