Key Insights

• Significantly high institutional ownership implies Altimmune's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions

• 44% of the business is held by the top 25 shareholders

• Using data from analyst forecasts alongside ownership research, one can better assess the future performance of a company

If you want to know who really controls Altimmune, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALT), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 56% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Given the vast amount of money and research capacities at their disposal, institutional ownership tends to carry a lot of weight, especially with individual investors. Therefore, a good portion of institutional money invested in the company is usually a huge vote of confidence on its future.

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

See our latest analysis for Altimmune

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Altimmune?

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 Altimmune. 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. 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 Altimmune's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Investors should note that institutions actually own more than half the company, so they can collectively wield significant power. Altimmune is not owned by hedge funds. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is BlackRock, Inc. with 5.7% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 5.5% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 4.4% by the third-largest shareholder.

On studying our ownership data, we found that 25 of the top shareholders collectively own less than 50% of the share register, implying that no single individual has a majority interest.

While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.