Gents,
For 50 of the current SP500 companies the number of Fully Diluted Shares (SharesFDQ) is less than the standard number of shares (SharesQ). Does anyone know what accounting situation can cause this to happen? At first glance, it seem like it should not be possible.
Thanks,
Daniel
The first thing to know is that the Shares function is actually a routine that does its very best to find a usable number for analysis purposes by looking at the various reported counts and falling back if necessary. It’s theoretically possible that you’re looking at two different time periods, though that is very, very rare. (Nearly every earnings release has EPS, sales and share count.)
Having looked at the data, it looks like SharesFD rounds and Shares does not. So nearly all of what you’re seeing is because of that. That is, Shares reads 2000.4 and SharesFD reads 2000.0.
I did a search to see if any company was more than 10% different, and in the S&P 500 there was only one, AMCR. A brief look at it seemed to show that it was involved in some M&A activity, having just acquired a company. So that would be my guess as to a possible cause.