Making Sense Of Market Capitalization

By Wallace Eddington

You may be a young person who has just come into a big raise or exciting new salary or a more seasoned working veteran who has come to the conclusion that you have to make your money work for you. The latter, by the way, seems to be a growing category.

I've demonstrated elsewhere that under the conditions of fiat currency, money-based saving cannot be treated as a reliable store of your wealth . So, whatever the reasons behind your choice, choosing to invest is a wise decision.

If though you are just entering the investor's world, you will profit mightily from an understanding of how to leverage market capitalization. Previously (see the link at the bottom of this article) I analyzed the relevance and usefulness of market capitalization for informing investment decisions. Such insights, however, are premised upon a clear understanding of the concepts involved.

At the risk of stating the obvious, market capitalization is the value that the market attributes to the total capital of a business. More precisely, it is the value the market attributes to the equity of the business.

So, we first have to be clear about this term, equity. It refers to the total value of the company's assets (those things it owns) minus the company's liabilities (the things it owes to others). The final sum of these calculations is the company's equity.

Let's consider an example. If a hypothetical company XXX had total assets (e.g., buildings, machinery, patents) of $10 million and total liabilities (e.g. bank debts, settlement in a court challenge, pending regulatory compliance costs) of $4 million, then the equity of the company - the difference between assets and liabilities - would be $6 million.

Now, we already have to backtrack a little. When we spoke of the assets and liabilities as having a value, we were referring to the value attributed to those items on the books of the company. Its accountants have added this all together on the basis of prices that have been stipulated in the relevant contracts: either giving XXX ownership or making claims upon its property. This is called the book value.

If the accountants are doing their job properly, their assignment of value is amended for the real world. Matters such as depreciation must be taken into account. Valuing equipment, used for decades, at the original purchase price would rather seriously misrepresent its current value: a fact which would be plainly evident should XXX attempt to sell the depreciated good in today's market.

All of this, still, though only concerns book value. The market's valuing of that equity remains an entirely separate matter. Any correspondence between the book and market value of a company's equity is not to be expected. Indeed, experience suggests a divergence of those evaluations is the more likely expectation.

To distinguish between book and market value, let's begin with a brief statement of what market capitalization is and how it is determined. Prices of course emerge from markets as a function of subjective value. The totality of everyone's unique, personal preferences establishes the level of demand in relation to the existing supply.

Shares in a company are a commodity sold on the market like any other. Except for the original public offering, when the shares of a company are first issued, they are sold (not to or from the company, but) between individuals not otherwise connected to that company.

Think of a situation in which Mary sells an apple to Jane. Prior to the exchange Mary was the apple-holder. Following it Jane is the apple-holder. Mary may or may not have bought the apple from an apple farmer, but in either case none of the money that Jane pays Mary for the apple is owed to the farmer (unless, obviously, a prior, specific arrangement to that effect was struck by the farmer and Mary, but that's pretty much unheard of).

The situation is just the same with the selling of a company's shares. The shareholder is the one who has bought the share and when that shareholder sells the share the entire payment is theirs. Nothing is owed the company in whom the share is a piece of ownership. This is no different than in the apples example. However, just as there is much that goes into determining the price of apples, so it is with the market valuation of any company's shares.

We now can understand how market capitalization is derived. There is at any point in time a market price for the shares of company XXX. To determine the market capitalization the total number of shares issued by the company is multiplied by this price. The resulting figure is XXX's market capitalization.

If our hypothetical company XXX has issued one million shares and the market value of them is going at $6 each, we know that the market capitalization of XXX is $6 million. By happy coincidence, this just happens to be the book value of the company as we hypothesized it was calculated by XXX's accountants.

Alas, lovely and symmetric as that example may be, in real life it rarely works out that way. Understanding, though, why it doesn't and why and how the almost certain discrepancy between book and market value is important for prospective investors requires a more elaborate discussion of market capitalization.

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Investors new and old have to keep up to date on the newest insights into market cap. To know the score be sure to check us out at the Market Capitalization site.