[Nick1984]

Hmmm I haven't heard of "available float" before. I'm pretty sure on our markets here all the available shares on offer are all publicly available. The government might own a majority of the shares in some companies (Qantas for example or Telstra in Australia) but these can be sold off at the discretion of the government direct to the public.

You can check with the listed company and its share registry to see exactly how many shares are on offer and who the top holders are. Each company when you purchase shares in it should have an accompaning share registry database which you can access. If you don't know you can always contact the exchange itself and ask for it because it should be publicly available information.

But once again, I'm pretty sure all the shares available in total should be available at the share registry and nothing should be kept from the public. However saying that different exchanges might have different levels of disclosure requirements!