Key Insights

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

• The top 25 shareholders own 46% of the company

• Ownership research along with analyst forecasts data help provide a good understanding of opportunities in a stock

If you want to know who really controls AbbVie Inc. (NYSE:ABBV), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. With 73% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

And things are looking up for institutional investors after the company gained US$11b in market cap last week. The one-year return on investment is currently 32% and last week's gain would have been more than welcomed.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of AbbVie, beginning with the chart below.

See our latest analysis for AbbVie

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About AbbVie?

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

Since institutional investors own more than half the issued stock, the board will likely have to pay attention to their preferences. Hedge funds don't have many shares in AbbVie. Our data shows that The Vanguard Group, Inc. is the largest shareholder with 9.7% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 7.7% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 4.9% by the third-largest shareholder.

A deeper look at our ownership data shows that the top 25 shareholders collectively hold less than half of the register, suggesting a large group of small holders where no single shareholder has a majority.

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.