How many shares are on issue?

[borat]

How do you determine the number of share a company has on issue?

Can this be done by dividing market cap/share price?

Or, is there a simple online resource for this kind of information.

Also, how do you know when a company has issued too many shares?

B.

 

[doctorj]

I use http://www.riu.com.au for this info, for resource companies atleast.

 

[surfingman]

Latest Appendix 3B in News should say how many are on issue or the company website sometimes, or latest quarterly report providing no new issues or options exercised since the report.

 

[TheRage]

Market Cap/ share price is the shares outstanding at that point in time. As others have pointed out Options will change the equation in the future. I like to look at how many options are outstanding and also look at a company with a track record as to how many options they have been paying to directors so that I can factor that into my future projections of Earnings per share. Of course on a new company you can never really know how many shares will be issued in the future. For this reason most of the buys that I make, not all, are based on a company with 10yrs history. I like companies that can manage their share outstanding so well that they balance the giving of options to directors so finely that they buy back either the same or more stock thereby over time preserving the stock holder value. The contradiction to this though is that unless a company can grow purely organically due to high free cash flows due to the nature of the business, it is likely they will issue capital to grow. The trick is to find a company that issues capital but not too much that it dilutes any growth that may have been gained by issuing that capital. If you can find a company that grows internally without issuing capital or taking on more debt and continues to return earnings per share increases greater than 20% consistenly then you have found the holy grail.