Here's another way to think about it. McDonald's is like a pie that has 765,317,332 slices (shares outstanding). As I am typing these words, each of these slices is valued by the market at $187.62. That's what we mean when we say that the stock is trading at 187.62. Now let's take the total number of slices and multiply it by the price per slice. We get about $143.58 billion. That's the current total value of this "pie" that we call McDonald's. Another word for this is "market cap" or "market capitalization."
