Finding a company’s market value

If you had to find a company’s market value, would you know where to look? Now, before you ask, we’re talking listed companies only here, so solely those which have shares actively traded on a stock exchange. This kind of figure is notoriously difficult to calculate for privately-owned enterprises but can easily be found for public companies worldwide. You just need to know where to look!

The market value of a publicly-traded company is known as its market capitalisation, or ‘market cap’ for short. The market cap itself is a fairly simple figure, generated by calculating the market value of the company’s outstanding shares (so we take the current share price and multiply it by the amount of shares currently in circulation). It will therefore vary from day to day, minute to minute depending on a company’s share price.

If you don’t have the time or the inclination to do the calculation yourself, the figure can be found in various online services including Capital IQ, Bloomberg, Fame, and Eikon. Read on to find out more.

Capital IQ

In Capital IQ you will find Market Cap in the company record. It is featured on the company summary page and the Key Stats option in the ‘Financials / Valuation’ menu will give you a more in-depth breakdown.

For historical Market Cap, select ‘Capitalization’ from the left hand menu, again under the ‘Financials / Valuation’ heading. You will find figures for both the most recent Market Cap and historical values.

For more information about Capital IQ, including how to set up your own account, see our previous post here.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s Market Cap can be found on the Company Description (DES) for any company, just beneath the price chart.

Bloomberg can currently only be accessed from off-campus. Find out more here.

Fame

Fame displays Market Cap on its company report. This can be found on the Key Information section of any publicly traded company’s report.

Eikon

In Eikon we can access Market Cap from the summary screen. A default, free float and outstanding share value is available with default share type being the most commonly stated.

For more information on accessing Eikon from off-campus, read our post here.

Other sources

Finally if you are looking for historical Market Caps for US Stocks you have access to the monthly values (MTCAP) for these via CRSP https://blogs.cranfield.ac.uk/library/researching-historical-stock-prices-using-crsp

Contact us at mirc@cranfield.ac.uk if you need any help doing this or any other similar searches.

Feature image from Pixabay. Available at: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/09/19/18/30/calculator-1680905_960_720.jpg