Key Insights

• Dropsuite's significant retail investors ownership suggests that the key decisions are influenced by shareholders from the larger public

• The top 13 shareholders own 50% of the company

• Insiders have been selling lately

If you want to know who really controls Dropsuite Limited (ASX:DSE), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. The group holding the most number of shares in the company, around 47% to be precise, is retail investors. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Hedge funds, on the other hand, account for 30% of the company's stockholders.

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

See our latest analysis for Dropsuite

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Dropsuite?

Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index.

Less than 5% of Dropsuite is held by institutional investors. This suggests that some funds have the company in their sights, but many have not yet bought shares in it. If the business gets stronger from here, we could see a situation where more institutions are keen to buy. When multiple institutional investors want to buy shares, we often see a rising share price. The past revenue trajectory (shown below) can be an indication of future growth, but there are no guarantees.

It looks like hedge funds own 30% of Dropsuite shares. That's interesting, because hedge funds can be quite active and activist. Many look for medium term catalysts that will drive the share price higher. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Topline Capital Management, LLC with 30% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 5.0% and 4.9% of the stock. Charif El-Ansari, who is the third-largest shareholder, also happens to hold the title of Member of the Board of Directors.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 13 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.