In This Article:
Key Insights
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Institutions' substantial holdings in Waste Management implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price
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The top 25 shareholders own 48% of the company
To get a sense of who is truly in control of Waste Management, Inc. (NYSE:WM), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are institutions with 82% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.
Since institutional have access to huge amounts of capital, their market moves tend to receive a lot of scrutiny by retail or individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute.
Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of Waste Management, beginning with the chart below.
See our latest analysis for Waste Management
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Waste Management?
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.
We can see that Waste Management does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. 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 Waste Management, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.
Investors should note that institutions actually own more than half the company, so they can collectively wield significant power. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Waste Management. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is currently the company's largest shareholder with 9.2% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 8.0% and 7.4% of the stock.
Our studies suggest that the top 25 shareholders collectively control less than half of the company's shares, meaning that the company's shares are widely disseminated and there is no dominant shareholder.
Researching institutional ownership is a good way to gauge and filter a stock's expected performance. The same can be achieved by studying analyst sentiments. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.