A look at the shareholders of DWF Group plc (LON:DWF) can tell us which group is most powerful. Institutions often own shares in more established companies, while it's not unusual to see insiders own a fair bit of smaller companies. I generally like to see some degree of insider ownership, even if only a little. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, 'Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
DWF Group is a smaller company with a market capitalization of UK£173m, so it may still be flying under the radar of many institutional investors. Our analysis of the ownership of the company, below, shows that institutions own shares in the company. Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about DWF Group.
Check out our latest analysis for DWF Group
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About DWF Group?
Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.
We can see that DWF Group does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of DWF Group, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.
We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in DWF Group. Dwf Group Plc., Employee Stock Ownership Plan is currently the company's largest shareholder with 12% of shares outstanding. With 8.0% and 5.0% of the shares outstanding respectively, Premier Fund Managers Limited and Standard Life Aberdeen plc are the second and third largest shareholders. In addition, we found that Nigel Knowles, the CEO has 0.9% of the shares allocated to his name
After doing some more digging, we found that the top 25 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.
While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.