Glossary

Float and low float

A stock's float is the number of its shares that are free to trade: the shares outstanding minus the shares held by officers, directors and other insiders and large affiliated holders. A low-float stock has few shares available, so a burst of buying can move its price a long way, fast.

Why it matters to a small-cap momentum trader

Supply is half of every move. When news brings in more buyers than a small float can supply, sellers pull their offers and the price climbs through the book; the same thin supply makes the drop just as quick when the buyers leave. That is why two stocks with the same headline can move very differently, and why momentum traders filter for low float before anything else.

Float rotation, the day's volume divided by the float, says how many times the float has changed hands. A stock that trades its whole float in the morning is in play.

Float vs shares outstanding

Shares outstanding is every share the company has issued and not bought back. Float takes out the shares insiders and affiliates hold, which rarely trade during the day. Companies state these numbers in their SEC filings, and the numbers go stale: a small cap that sells new stock every few weeks has a bigger float than its last annual report shows. There is no single official float, so data vendors can show different numbers for the same stock on the same day.

Low float has no legal definition either. Many small-cap scanners draw the line at 20 million shares or fewer, and that is where the low-float scanners in Hindsight Markets draw it.

Float in Hindsight Markets

Float is read as of the day you replay, from the filings the SEC had accepted by that moment, so a replay never knows about an offering that came later. It is built to agree with the float small-cap day traders see on their own scanners. Where a company has not reported what its insiders hold, the number is the full share count, and the real float is lower. The scanner picture on the home page is the low-float gainers scan at 10:40 ET on 2026-09-16, with RETO and MEDS at the top.