If you want to know who really controls A.G. BARR p.l.c. (LON:BAG), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. Generally speaking, as a company grows, institutions will increase their ownership. Conversely, insiders often decrease their ownership over time. 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.

A.G. BARR isn't enormous, but it's not particularly small either. It has a market capitalization of UK£584m, which means it would generally expect to see some institutions on the share registry. Our analysis of the ownership of the company, below, shows that institutions own shares in the company. We can zoom in on the different ownership groups, to learn more about A.G. BARR.

See our latest analysis for A.G. BARR

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About A.G. BARR?

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.

A.G. BARR already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. This can indicate that the company has a certain degree of credibility in the investment community. However, it is best to be wary of relying on the supposed validation that comes with institutional investors. They too, get it wrong sometimes. 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 A.G. BARR's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.

Institutional investors own over 50% of the company, so together than can probably strongly influence board decisions. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in A.G. BARR. Our data shows that William Robin Barr is the largest shareholder with 15% of shares outstanding. With 14% and 5.3% of the shares outstanding respectively, Lindsell Train Limited and Rathbone Investment Management Limited are the second and third largest shareholders.

On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 8 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.

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.