After losing 32% in the past year, St Barbara Limited (ASX:SBM) institutional owners must be relieved by the recent gain
In This Article:
Key Insights
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Significantly high institutional ownership implies St Barbara's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions
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A total of 9 investors have a majority stake in the company with 52% ownership
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Analyst forecasts along with ownership data serve to give a strong idea about prospects for a business
If you want to know who really controls St Barbara Limited (ASX:SBM), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. With 71% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. That is, the group stands to benefit the most if the stock rises (or lose the most if there is a downturn).
Institutional investors would appreciate the 12% increase in share price last week, given their one-year losses have totalled a disappointing 32%.
Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about St Barbara.
View our latest analysis for St Barbara
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About St Barbara?
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.
As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in St Barbara. This can indicate that the company has a certain degree of credibility in the investment community. However, it is best to be wary of relying on the supposed validation that comes with institutional investors. They too, get it wrong sometimes. 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 St Barbara, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.
Investors should note that institutions actually own more than half the company, so they can collectively wield significant power. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in St Barbara. Our data shows that IPConcept Fund Management SA is the largest shareholder with 9.5% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 9.2% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 5.4% by the third-largest shareholder.
On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 9 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.