A lot of people when they first think about stocks tend to lock in on the share price.

Maybe this was you or maybe this is a friend of yours.

They'll say, wow, Amazon is at $3,355.

That's expensive.

By contrast, this same mentality

when looking at penny stocks can get a lot more excited.

Wow, some penny stock they're seeing promoted by someone,

perhaps some nare do well and they'll think, wow, this stock is at 33 cents, not 3,300 like Amazon,

nope, 33 cents, and they'll think, well, that's the one to buy, right?

The one at 33 cents, because if it just reaches a dollar, you triple your money if if from the earliest days of the

Motley Fool we've tried to get people focused not in the price per

share of the company but rather on the market cap of the company the price per share of

a stock tells you almost nothing it's the price to buy one share of the stock but

how many shares does the company have outstanding?

In math, we multiply two multiplicans together.

I hope I have my term right to reach a product,

but the price per share is only one multiplicand.

If you don't know the other one, you can't do any meaningful math or figure out much of the world around you.

F. know that you need to know the shares outstanding

and then multiply that by the price per share.

And now you know the actual full value of the company.

It's full price tag.

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