In a privately held company, the shares of stock are all owned by a small group of people who know one another. They buy and sell their shares amongst themselves. A publicly held company is owned by thousands of people who trade their shares on a public stock exchange.
An issued share is simply a share that has been given to an investor, whereas outstanding shares refer to all the shares that have been issued by a company.
Not to be confused with authorized shares, outstanding shares refer to the number of stocks that a company has issued. This number represents all the shares that can be bought and sold by the public, as well as all the restricted shares that require special permission before being transacted.
Owning shares means you’re also a company owner.
When you buy shares, you’re buying a share of the company’s assets and its profits. In fact (and in law), you’re a part owner of the company.
If you know the market cap of a company and you know its share price, then figuring out the number of outstanding shares is easy. Just take the market capitalization figure and divide it by the share price. The result is the number of shares on which the market capitalization number was based.
Shares outstanding refer to a company’s stock currently held by all its shareholders, including share blocks held by institutional investors and restricted shares owned by the company’s officers and insiders. Outstanding shares are shown on a company’s balance sheet under the heading “Capital Stock.”
Outstanding shares are the total number of common stocks owned by investors. … They also do not include preferred shares, which are stocks that do not carry shareholder voting rights, but do give their owners some ownership rights and pay a fixed dividend.
Shares outstanding refers to the total number of shares a company has issued, while the public float — also referred to as floating shares or “the float” — are shares that are publicly owned, unrestricted and available on the open market.
Outstanding shares can never exceed the authorized number, since the authorized shares total is the maximum number of shares that a company can issue.
Outstanding Stock
Holders have the voting rights associated with the particular stock issue. If shareholders put forth an initiative for a vote, outstanding stock provides the voting roll.
Shares outstanding is just the amount of all the company’s stock that’s in the hands of its stockholders. By itself, it is not intrinsically good or bad. … Shares outstanding are useful for calculating many widely used measures of a company, like its market capitalization and earnings per share.
Specialists and market makers always have enough shares in their inventory to sell to you, but even if they run out of shares, they always can borrow them from someone else. These professionals make money when they trade, so they will always find a way to accommodate a buy order at a small profit.