Key Insights

• Insiders appear to have a vested interest in Toro's growth, as seen by their sizeable ownership

• 54% of the company is held by a single shareholder (Petros Panagiotidis)

• Ownership research, combined with past performance data can help provide a good understanding of opportunities in a stock

If you want to know who really controls Toro Corp. (NASDAQ:TORO), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are individual insiders with 54% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

As a result, insiders were the biggest beneficiaries of last week’s 11% gain.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Toro.

View our latest analysis for Toro

What Does The Lack Of Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Toro?

We don't tend to see institutional investors holding stock of companies that are very risky, thinly traded, or very small. Though we do sometimes see large companies without institutions on the register, it's not particularly common.

There are multiple explanations for why institutions don't own a stock. The most common is that the company is too small relative to funds under management, so the institution does not bother to look closely at the company. On the other hand, it's always possible that professional investors are avoiding a company because they don't think it's the best place for their money. Toro's earnings and revenue track record (below) may not be compelling to institutional investors -- or they simply might not have looked at the business closely.

Hedge funds don't have many shares in Toro. With a 54% stake, CEO Petros Panagiotidis is the largest shareholder. With such a huge stake, we infer that they have significant control of the future of the company. It's usually considered a good sign when insiders own a significant number of shares in the company, and in this case, we're glad to see a company insider with such skin in the game. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 0.8% and 0.3%, of the shares outstanding, respectively.

Researching institutional ownership is a good way to gauge and filter a stock's expected performance. The same can be achieved by studying analyst sentiments. We're not picking up on any analyst coverage of the stock at the moment, so the company is unlikely to be widely held.

Insider Ownership Of Toro

The definition of company insiders can be subjective and does vary between jurisdictions. Our data reflects individual insiders, capturing board members at the very least. The company management answer to the board and the latter should represent the interests of shareholders. Notably, sometimes top-level managers are on the board themselves.