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Key Insights

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

• 51% of the business is held by the top 10 shareholders

• Analyst forecasts along with ownership data serve to give a strong idea about prospects for a business

To get a sense of who is truly in control of WaFd, Inc. (NASDAQ:WAFD), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are institutions with 78% ownership. 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 WaFd.

View our latest analysis for WaFd

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About WaFd?

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.

WaFd already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. 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 WaFd'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. Hedge funds don't have many shares in WaFd. The company's largest shareholder is BlackRock, Inc., with ownership of 13%. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 11% and 6.9%, of the shares outstanding, respectively.

We also observed that the top 10 shareholders account for more than half of the share register, with a few smaller shareholders to balance the interests of the larger ones to a certain extent.

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 plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.