/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>55636672
This is data from Yahoo Finance. I'm going to use WMT because I work there and know the stock

WMT has $426.4 bn market cap. This is basically what the company is worth according to it's share price. Eg, it's what the free market says the entire company is worth, based on the unit price of the shares, and the total number of available shares. You can see it's simple math: $158.37 x 2.69B shares out = 426.46B. Easy.

Of the 2.69B public shares outstanding (as opposed to vested/incentive shares for CEOs and management etc), there is a float of 1.43B - this is how many shares are available on the free market. You can see 47% of the public shares are held by insiders and 33% are held by institutions. Institutions are things like retirement funds, ETFs, etc. Seeing a large percentage of insider holdings shows confidence in the company and a large number of firms holding them shows stability (eg they are likely to be held for retirement funds long term). However, beware of smallcap stocks (less than $100m market cap) having a lot of insider and little firm holdings - they might try to dump heavily if the price reaches a certain level.

Beta is how correlated it is to the broad market. A 1.00 beta means it moves perfectly with the stock index. Something like SPY or VOO tracks the SPX very accurately. Risky stuff like mining companies and biotech are >1 beta, while consumer defensive and utilities are likely to be <1 beta, which means they move slowly compared to the market's movements, so they are less likely to plummet in a downturn (but also have slower, limited growth). You can see the share price is above the 50 and 200 day moving average (50/200MA). This means we are currently in an uptrend, but we don't know when it will stop. It's also near it's all time highs.