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Market Capitalization
Term category: General Investing, Advanced
In 10 words or less: The total value of a company's outstanding stock.

Definition: This is the total value of all of the shares of stock. You find it by taking the number of shares and multiplying it by the price per share.

StockJargon Advice: This gives you an idea of how big a company is. Market capitalizations are further broken down into the various categories:

Large cap: $5 billion or more
Mid cap: $1 billion to $5 billion
Small cap: $50 million to $1 billion
Micro cap: Less than $50 million

A general rule of thumb is that small and micro cap stocks are riskier than large cap stocks.

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