In This Article:
To get a sense of who is truly in control of Xaar plc (LON:XAR), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 88% ownership. That is, the group stands to benefit the most if the stock rises (or lose the most if there is a downturn).
Since institutional have access to huge amounts of capital, their market moves tend to receive a lot of scrutiny by retail or individual investors. Hence, having a considerable amount of institutional money invested in a company is often regarded as a desirable trait.
In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Xaar.
View our latest analysis for Xaar
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Xaar?
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.
We can see that Xaar 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. 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 Xaar's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.
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 Xaar. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Schroder Investment Management Limited with 28% of shares outstanding. With 11% and 9.5% of the shares outstanding respectively, Odyssean Capital LLP and Aberforth Partners LLP are the second and third largest shareholders.
To make our study more interesting, we found that the top 4 shareholders control more than half of the company which implies that this group has considerable sway over the company's decision-making.
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 plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.
Insider Ownership Of Xaar
While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.