shares, page-5

It is lots of shares... Quite common in small exploration companies who have been forced to raise extra funds by selling additional shares.

Personally I prefer to invest in a company with less shares on market but it's not always a terrible thing.

For your research:

Good place to start is the trading room (Aussie site): http://www.tradingroom.com.au/apps/index.ac

Type in your stock code for a quote, and then you can use the menu bar on that page to click on "detail" which gives you number of shares, market cap etc.

You can use that same page to read recent company announcements and I would strongly recommend you start by reading the most recent quarterly activities report for the company. This usually gives you an overview of what the company is up to and how much money they have spent, importantly how much cash they have in the bank.

Good luck.