Most people often mistake that number for the actual amount of shares available when it's simply a count of how many trades occurred. For example.... Say I bought 2M shares and sold them two weeks later then bought more and sold again. That will show as 4M shares... So, you have multiple amounts of people flipping shares which creates a larger amount of shares traded. So, in essence that number of shares traded has NOTHING to do with the amount of shares available from the company Common error by many noobs