What percent of a company is a share, and when you buy shares who are you buying them from?

Question

I was just wondering this earlier. How can you compare shares between companies if each share isnt a set percentage of the company? Or maybe I'm just way overthinking this...

Answer 1

What percent is a share? It varies by company and is based on the number of shares outstanding. Example: 1 share of Asta Funding (ticker: ASFI) is 0.0000074% of the company because ASFI has 13.83 million shares outstanding (1/13.83M). 1 share of Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) is 0.00000001% of the company because it has 9.79 billion shares outstanding (1/9.79B).

Who do you buy them from? In most trades, you submit a "buy" order which is routed to a "market maker". The market maker matches your order with someone who is selling shares and you swap. If no one is selling shares, you buy the shares directly from the market maker. The company does not get any money when you buy shares like this.

In an initial or secondary public offering where the company is trying to raise money, you buy shares from the company and the company gets the money (minus broker fees).

How can you compare shares? You don't compare shares. Think about this - if both MSFT and ASFI earned $50 million this year, Microsoft would have earned $0.005 per share ($50M/9.79B shares) while ASFI would have earned $3.79 per share ($50M/13.83M shares). What does that mean? Well, nothing.

See, in this example, MSFT's revenue would have been 99.9% lower than last year and ASFI's revenue would have been 50% lower. In short, comparing SHARES is pointless.

You have to figure out the value of the entire business. Then, divide that value by the number of outstanding shares, be it 13 million or 10 billion, and that will give you a value per share. The value per share is relative to the number of outstanding shares and can't be compared to other stocks. The value of the business is fixed and can be compared.

Answer 2

Visit the company's website and look for an investors section. You should be able to find the company's last annual report which will tell you how many shares the company has outstanding. Most companies issue millions of shares of stock. Once you have the number of shares from the annual report, you can determine what percentage each share is........it will be a pretty tiny number.

Answer 3

If there are 100 shares then each share is 1% of the company..

Just find the total number of shares and you can figure it out.

Answer 4

It's complicated but there is no set percentage and many companies have several different kinds of shares. On the stock exchange, you generally buy them from who ever is selling them.