The free float of a public company is the percentage of freely available shares to the investing public. It is a measure of how many shares are reasonably liquid.

Most indices are adjusted based on companies’ free float, which means companies are weighted by the total value of shares that are available to portfolio investors rather than the total market cap.

The Company Free Float Service allows clients to buy each dataset separately, and where historical data is available, it can be purchased annually.

Methodology

Whenver the Stock Exchange does not provide its free float methodology, or if they only provide free float information for a certain number of securities, EDI will default to its methodology, which consists of deducting the number of shares held by the significant, controlling, or substantial shareholders (the terminology might vary depending on the market) from the total number of shares outstanding.

To complement it’s Share Outstanding service, EDI is now offering Free Float Data from 69 exchanges around the globe. EDI is monitoring another 72 markets where data is unavailable and will review the service coverage regularly.

For each market, EDI will provide a specific definition of Free Floating Shares.

The data will contain as much detailed information as possible such as ISIN, Issuer name, to enable clear identification of each security.