Subject: Re: Back of the envelope
FWIW, I'm using 1,438,223 A-share eq. or 2.1573 Billion B-share equivalents as the most up to date shares outstanding. there were almost a million b-shares issued on Halloween to finish up the BHE deal. But that's the going-forward number, not the Q3 figure.
It's good to know the up-to-date numbers for things like market cap, but don't use it as the divisor for figures from the previous quarter end, you should use matching dates. That's because stuff that happened after the end of the quarter will generally have both positives (higher share of earnings of BHE) and negatives (higher share count), which usually cancel out pretty closely. You don't want to use one pre-transaction number and divide by another post-transaction number.
I used to use the most recent share count all the time till I realized that this was causing errors.
Jim