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To get a sense of who is truly in control of B&G Foods, Inc. (NYSE:BGS), 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 67% ownership. That is, the group stands to benefit the most if the stock rises (or lose the most if there is a downturn).
And institutional investors endured the highest losses after the company's share price fell by 5.5% last week. Needless to say, the recent loss which further adds to the one-year loss to shareholders of 36% might not go down well especially with this category of shareholders. Institutions or "liquidity providers" control large sums of money and therefore, these types of investors usually have a lot of influence over stock price movements. Hence, if weakness in B&G Foods' share price continues, institutional investors may feel compelled to sell the stock, which might not be ideal for individual investors.
In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of B&G Foods.
See our latest analysis for B&G Foods
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About B&G Foods?
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 B&G Foods 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. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of B&G Foods, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.
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 B&G Foods. The company's largest shareholder is BlackRock, Inc., with ownership of 16%. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is the second largest shareholder owning 11% of common stock, and State Street Global Advisors, Inc. holds about 5.2% of the company stock.
Looking at the shareholder registry, we can see that 50% of the ownership is controlled by the top 19 shareholders, meaning that no single shareholder has a majority interest in the ownership.
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.