Key Insights

• Institutions' substantial holdings in Transurban Group implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price

• A total of 8 investors have a majority stake in the company with 51% ownership

• Insiders have bought recently

A look at the shareholders of Transurban Group (ASX:TCL) can tell us which group is most powerful. With 67% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Because institutional owners have a huge pool of resources and liquidity, their investing decisions tend to carry a great deal of weight, especially with individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute.

Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about Transurban Group.

View our latest analysis for Transurban Group

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Transurban 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 Transurban 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. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It's therefore worth looking at Transurban Group's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Institutional investors own over 50% of the company, so together than can probably strongly influence board decisions. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Transurban Group. BNP Paribas Securities Corp, Asset Management Arm is currently the company's largest shareholder with 11% of shares outstanding. UniSuper Limited is the second largest shareholder owning 11% of common stock, and BlackRock, Inc. holds about 8.1% of the company stock.

On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 8 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.

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. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.