Skewed Market Capitalization figures from yahoo

11 Jan 2008

While looking for Big companies it was reported that yahoo does not report the market capitalization of two big companies correctly. We tried looking for the Market Capitalization figures for BCH and MTU. Here is the screen shot for MTU taken from yahoo and msn finances.


Screen shot for market capitalization figure for BCH from yahoo.



Screen shot for market capitalization figure for BCH from MSN.

Apparently the yahoo figures are screwed somehow. The google finance fugures match with the msn finance. While yahoo has traditionally been providing finance and stock market data, it seems to be lacking innovations while msn and google finance are catching up.

Market capitalization (market cap in short) is equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding of a public company.

Mathematically,

Market Capitalization = share price x number of shares outstanding

So if a public company has 100 million outstanding shares and if each share is prices $10, the market capitalization will be $1 billion.