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, well, Amazon, it's at 3,305 per share. That's expensive. By contrast, the same

mentality when looking at penny stocks can get a lot more excited. Some penny stock they're seeing promoted by

someone, perhaps some near do well, and they'll think, wow, stocks at 33 cents, not

$3,300, like Amazon, 33.

They'll think, well, that's the one to buy,

the one at 33 cents, because if it just reaches a dollar,

you triple your money. Well, from the earliest days of the Motley

Fool, we've tried to get people focused not on 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 multiple cans together,

but the price per share is only one of those multiple cans.

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

Well fools with a capital 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 its full price tag it's market capitalization

market cap.

Well to teach this lesson inexorably and unforgettable

we invented a game. That's what I do.

The date was August 9th, 2017. History will show. We've been playing every quarter since. You're playing too. You know this. You've been playing along all the way through and it's that time of the year again, that time of the

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