If you want to know who really controls KVH Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:KVHI), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. Insiders often own a large chunk of younger, smaller, companies while huge companies tend to have institutions as shareholders. I quite like to see at least a little bit of insider ownership. As Charlie Munger said 'Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

KVH Industries is a smaller company with a market capitalization of US$229m, so it may still be flying under the radar of many institutional investors. In the chart below, we can see that institutions are noticeable on the share registry. Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about KVH Industries.

View our latest analysis for KVH Industries

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About KVH Industries?

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 KVH Industries does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. 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. 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 KVH Industries, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Our data indicates that hedge funds own 10% of KVH Industries. That worth noting, since hedge funds are often quite active investors, who may try to influence management. Many want to see value creation (and a higher share price) in the short term or medium term. The company's largest shareholder is Needham Investment Management, L.L.C., with ownership of 10%. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 9.6% and 9.3% of the stock. In addition, we found that Martin A. Van Heyningen, the CEO has 4.9% of the shares allocated to their name.

On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 7 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.

Researching institutional ownership is a good way to gauge and filter a stock's expected performance. The same can be achieved by studying analyst sentiments. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.