When you see lists of popular shares, you might wonder just what this means.
A quick look at the companies there reveals some large companies that you might suspect, called the usual suspects, but it can also reveal many companies that you might not have heard of.
These could be because they are actually relatively small, because they operate in a sector that is business to business so you wouldn't have heard of them as an individual consumer, or it could simply be that they own other brands or are a master brand but their public facing materials tend to use a different name.
Whatever the reason, the way that popular shares are worked out is actually simple and stands to reason, being as it is based on the number of shares that are traded.
This figure is usually termed as the "volume" and the volume of th stock traded simply refers to the number of shares traded, so if a million are traded in a day then that's the volume of shares in that company that have been traded in that day.
On the FTSE there are some extremely popular shares that have massive volumes traded.