Key Insights

• Significantly high institutional ownership implies Ryman Healthcare's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions

• 50% of the business is held by the top 16 shareholders

• Insiders have been selling lately

If you want to know who really controls Ryman Healthcare Limited (NZSE:RYM), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 49% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Because institutional owners have a huge pool of resources and liquidity, their investing decisions tend to carry a great deal of weight, especially with individual investors. Therefore, a good portion of institutional money invested in the company is usually a huge vote of confidence on its future.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of Ryman Healthcare, beginning with the chart below.

Check out our latest analysis for Ryman Healthcare

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Ryman Healthcare?

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

We can see that Ryman Healthcare does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. 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. 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 Ryman Healthcare, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Ryman Healthcare. Our data shows that Karori Capital Limited is the largest shareholder with 7.7% of shares outstanding. With 5.6% and 5.4% of the shares outstanding respectively, BlackRock, Inc. and Forsyth Barr Investment Management Limited are the second and third largest shareholders.

Looking at the shareholder registry, we can see that 50% of the ownership is controlled by the top 16 shareholders, meaning that no single shareholder has a majority interest in the ownership.

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.