What Is Market Cap? A Foolish Analyst's Plain-English Guide to the Metric That Separates Winners From Losers.
Market cap is a quick way of understanding the total size and value of a company.
Overview
What makes a company big or small? There are lots of ways to measure the value and size of companies. But one of the most important ways is market cap.
What is market cap? It's short for "market capitalization." This is a fancy way of saying the overall size of a company's estimated market value based on what investors are willing to pay for the company's shares.
Details
Market cap is one of the most used and frequently discussed ways of measuring and understanding the value and size of a publicly traded company. When investors say that a company is a "billion-dollar company" or "trillion-dollar company," they're usually talking about market cap.
Source
Originally published at www.fool.com.