Why Stock Float Shares Differ Across Data Providers
Summary
The document explains why a stock’s reported float may be difficult to reproduce from company filings. Float aims to represent shares available for trading by subtracting holdings considered closely held or otherwise unlikely to trade from shares outstanding. Yet the category is not precisely defined: providers can disagree about insider holdings, controlling stakes, restricted shares, employee plans, retirement accounts, trusts, and long-term investors. As a result, a provider’s published float figure may not map to one definitive SEC filing value.
The answer describes common exclusions, including insider and controlling-interest holdings and restricted shares, while noting that treatment of employee plans and unit investment trusts can differ. It also points out that float is used to calculate float-adjusted market capitalization for equity indices. For assessing potential liquidity, the response suggests examining turnover instead. No specific calculation for the example stock is supplied, and the document emphasizes that vendor methodology choices limit direct comparisons between float figures.
Key ideas
- Float estimates depend on which shares a data provider considers unavailable for trading.
- Common exclusions include insider holdings, controlling stakes, and restricted shares.
- Providers may differ on employee plans, retirement accounts, trusts, and long-term holdings.
- Float-adjusted market capitalization is used in some equity index calculations.
- Turnover may be more useful than float alone for assessing potential liquidity.
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# How to quantify shares float on a stock? # How to quantify shares float on a stock? I searched this before but never got further than generic definitions and and websites to look at. What I'm looking for is how to define a stock's shares float quantity. How does Yahoo Finance or Finviz define the amount of shares float? By definition shares float is represented by 'subtracting closely held shares -- owned by insiders, employees, the company's Employee Stock Ownership Plan or other major long-term shareholders -- from the total shares outstanding' Still, how does anyone calculate that? Where do they get the data? I've searched all 10-Q and 10-K files on SEC for long-term shareholders and it doesn't show anywhere. For the sake of argument, at the momento I'm searching this stock: AVCT and it's shares float is 1,48M on Yahoo Finance. How do I find this value on SEC fillings? Any help trying to get the 'original' data is more than welcome. ## Answer by kurtosis (score 2, accepted) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/57175 The term float shares is not well-defined. The idea seems simple: exclude shares which are not likely or able to trade. However, this immediately raises questions of which shares to exclude: - shares which have not traded in a few years? - shares held in a trust prohibiting them from trading over the next 5 years? - shares held by a long-term investor? - shares which are restricted? - shares held in an employee retirement account? Hence you will find different numbers for float shares depending on your data source. This article from Zack's discusses these issues. When computing float shares, we usually exclude shares held by company insiders, investors with a controlling interest, and restricted shares. Some data sources will also exclude shares held in employee stock ownership or retirement plans. Should shares held in a unit investment trust be excluded? I would argue they should be since the trust's portfolio being unmanaged means the UIT will not trade them even if the stock goes bankrupt. Unfortunately, I think most data sources do not exclude these shares. The Frank Russell Company and MSCI use float shares in computing float market cap for their equity indices. However, if you just are looking for a measure of potential liquidity, I would instead look at the distribution of turnover.
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This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.