If you want to know who really controls Elevate Credit, Inc. (NYSE:ELVT), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. Institutions will often hold stock in bigger companies, and we expect to see insiders owning a noticeable percentage of the smaller ones. I generally like to see some degree of insider ownership, even if only a little. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, 'Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
Elevate Credit is not a large company by global standards. It has a market capitalization of US$157m, which means it wouldn't have the attention of many institutional investors. Our analysis of the ownership of the company, below, shows that institutions own shares in the company. Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about Elevate Credit.
View our latest analysis for Elevate Credit
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Elevate Credit?
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.
As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Elevate Credit. 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 Elevate Credit's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.
Elevate Credit is not owned by hedge funds. TCMI Inc. is currently the company's largest shareholder with 16% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 11% and 7.1%, of the shares outstanding, respectively. In addition, we found that Jason Harvison, the CEO has 1.0% of the shares allocated to their name.
We did some more digging and found that 6 of the top shareholders account for roughly 53% of the register, implying that along with larger shareholders, there are a few smaller shareholders, thereby balancing out each others interests somewhat.
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.