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I was perusing Google Finance and noticed that under the "Trends" tab in the third section, there are different companies listed under the biggest "stock price" change and biggest "market cap" change for the day.

As I understand it, market cap is simply the (price of stock) x (# of outstanding shares), which to me makes the biggest daily stock gains the likely candidates for biggest daily market cap gain as well.

Of course, companies can release more shares into the market, but does this actually happen on a regular basis?

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When you look at those results you'll see that it lists the actual market cap for the stocks. The ones on the biggest price move are usually close the the $1B capitalization cut-off that they use. (The don't report anything with less than $1B in capitalization on these lists.) The ones on the biggest market cap are much larger companies.

So, the answer is that a 40% change in price on a company that has $1B capitalization will be a $400M change in market cap. A 4% change on a company with $100B capitalization will be a $4B change in market cap. The one that moved 40% will make the "price" list but not the market cap list and vice versa.

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    As we both had the same response and yours came in first, I will delete mine, only to add the following: Smaller companies may be more likely to have extreme valuation changes over a short period of time - for example small tech companies which release new technology. This could make it more likely that in a given day, the highest share price change would be a small company, where their small relative market capitalization would prevent them from also being the largest market cap change.
    – Grade 'Eh' Bacon
    Commented Jul 12, 2016 at 17:29

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