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.
Knowing the number of shares a firm has outstanding is significant for a couple of reasons. One is that knowing the shares outstanding can help investors find the market capitalization (total value) of a business. Multiply the share price by the number of shares outstanding to find a company’s market capitalization.
By itself, it is not intrinsically good or bad. However, what is significant is the number of shares outstanding. Shares outstanding are useful for calculating many widely used measures of a company, like its market capitalization and earnings per share.
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.
Key Takeaways. Authorized shares are the maximum number of shares a company is allowed to issue to investors, as laid out in its articles of incorporation. Outstanding shares are the actual shares issued or sold to investors from the available number of authorized shares.
Shares are beholden to the same economic laws as anything else that can be bought or sold: price is determined by supply and demand. Thus, the value of each share is inversely related to the number of shares outstanding, with all other things being equal.
Outstanding shares can never exceed the authorized number, since the authorized shares total is the maximum number of shares that a company can issue.
What Are Shares Outstanding? 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.
How to calculate outstanding shares
- Go to the balance sheet of the company in question and look in the shareholders’ equity section, which is near the bottom of the report.
- Look in the line item for preferred stock. …
- Look in the line item for common stock. …
- Look in the line item for treasury stock.
Shares with the greatest cost basis are sold first. If more than one lot has the same price, the lot with the earliest acquisition date is sold first. Shares with a long-term holding period are sold first, beginning with those with the greatest cost basis.