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FINANCIALS / BALANCE SHEET / SHARES
SharesCur(barsAgo)
Full Description
This function returns the most recent available shares outstanding, taken from the daily pricing database rather than the financial statements. The offset is in "bars" which in this case is trading days. A zero is the most recent day's shares outstanding, while any higher number is the figure from that many bars in the past.

NOTE: Returns only the # of shares from the current primary stock. Using SharesCur with companies with multiple share classes for things like MarketCap will not be correct.

This version of shares outstanding has the potential to be updated not only on the regular earnings reporting schedule, but also with information that might become available in between those announcements: This includes proxies, buybacks, announced conversions of options and any other corporate event that might impact the number of outstanding shares.

While there is no upper limit to the number of bars, the data itself starts in mid-1998. Prior to 2002, ADRs use the latest interim financial-statement figures instead of the daily shares outstanding numbers because of missing data in that time period.

This line is net of treasury shares.