What’s the difference between stocks and shares?
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Microsoft is a company.
MSFT is the symbol for Microsoft’s stock, which represents the total investable portion of Microsoft the company, in other words, all the parts of the company which can be bought and sold by anyone.
The stock is sliced up into billions of shares. Each share is a tiny slice of the total stock and thus represents a tiny slice of ownership of the company.
As of today, one share of MSFT, i.e. one unit of investment, is worth about $245. If you buy 10 shares of MSFT stock, you’ll own about $2450 worth.
There are about 7.45 billion shares of MSFT stock in existence. That means the market capitalization (market cap), or the theoretical value of Microsoft the company based on the number of shares times the price per share, is about 7.45 billion x $245 = $1.84 trillion.
That doesn’t mean Microsoft could cash out today and get $1.84 trillion or that the company’s assets are worth that much, just that it’s the theoretical value of their stock if everyone sold their shares at the current price. If everyone went out and tried to sell their MSFT shares right now, there would be lots of sellers and few or no buyers, so the supply would exceed the demand, and so the share price would rapidly plummet towards zero.
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