If you want to know who really controls Argonaut Gold Inc. (TSE:AR), 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. Companies that used to be publicly owned tend to have lower insider ownership.
Argonaut Gold is a smaller company with a market capitalization of CA$728m, so it may still be flying under the radar of many institutional investors. Taking a look at our data on the ownership groups (below), it seems that institutional investors have bought into the company. Let's delve deeper into each type of owner, to discover more about Argonaut Gold.
See our latest analysis for Argonaut Gold
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Argonaut Gold?
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.
As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Argonaut Gold. 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 Argonaut Gold's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.
Our data indicates that hedge funds own 19% of Argonaut Gold. 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. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is GMT Capital Corp. with 19% of shares outstanding. Van Eck Associates Corporation is the second largest shareholder owning 9.1% of common stock, and Donald Smith & Co., Inc. holds about 2.8% of the company stock.
After doing some more digging, we found that the top 20 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.
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. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.
Insider Ownership Of Argonaut Gold
The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. The company management answer to the board and the latter should represent the interests of shareholders. Notably, sometimes top-level managers are on the board themselves.