The big shareholder groups in Incitec Pivot Limited (ASX:IPL) have power over the company. 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.

With a market capitalization of AU$6.3b, Incitec Pivot is rather large. We'd expect to see institutional investors on the register. Companies of this size are usually well known to retail investors, too. In the chart below, we can see that institutions are noticeable on the share registry. We can zoom in on the different ownership groups, to learn more about Incitec Pivot.

View our latest analysis for Incitec Pivot

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Incitec Pivot?

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 Incitec Pivot. 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. 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 Incitec Pivot's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Hedge funds don't have many shares in Incitec Pivot. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Orbis Investment Management Limited with 6.9% of shares outstanding. The second and third largest shareholders are Harris Associates L.P. and Perpetual Limited, with an equal amount of shares to their name at 5.0%.

A deeper look at our ownership data shows that the top 25 shareholders collectively hold less than half of the register, suggesting a large group of small holders where no single shareholder 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 plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.

Insider Ownership Of Incitec Pivot

While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. 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.