In This Article:
Key Insights
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Given the large stake in the stock by institutions, Saga's stock price might be vulnerable to their trading decisions
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The top 6 shareholders own 51% of the company
If you want to know who really controls Saga plc (LON:SAGA), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. With 37% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).
Since institutional have access to huge amounts of capital, their market moves tend to receive a lot of scrutiny by retail or individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute.
In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Saga.
View our latest analysis for Saga
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Saga?
Many institutions measure their performance against an index that approximates the local market. So they usually pay more attention to companies that are included in major indices.
We can see that Saga does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can't rely on that fact alone since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see Saga's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.
We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Saga. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Roger De Haan with 26% of shares outstanding. With 8.1% and 6.6% of the shares outstanding respectively, Eldose Babu and Saga Plc., Employee Stock Ownership Plan are the second and third largest shareholders.
On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 6 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.
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 is some analyst coverage of the stock, but it could still become more well known, with time.