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Every investor in Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. Institutions often own shares in more established companies, while it's not unusual to see insiders own a fair bit of smaller companies. Companies that used to be publicly owned tend to have lower insider ownership.

Advanced Micro Devices is a pretty big company. It has a market capitalization of US$64b. Normally institutions would own a significant portion of a company this size. Taking a look at our data on the ownership groups (below), it's seems that institutional investors have bought into the company. We can zoom in on the different ownership groups, to learn more about Advanced Micro Devices.

See our latest analysis for Advanced Micro Devices

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Advanced Micro Devices?

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.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Advanced Micro Devices. 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 Advanced Micro Devices, (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. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Advanced Micro Devices. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is currently the company's largest shareholder with 9.6% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 7.1% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 4.6% by the third-largest shareholder.

A closer look at our ownership figures suggests that the top 15 shareholders have a combined ownership of 50% implying that no one share holder has a majority.

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 a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.