Key Insights

• Perpetual's significant individual investors ownership suggests that the key decisions are influenced by shareholders from the larger public

• A total of 22 investors have a majority stake in the company with 50% ownership

• Institutional ownership in Perpetual is 38%

If you want to know who really controls Perpetual Limited (ASX:PPT), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. We can see that individual investors own the lion's share in the company with 48% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

And institutions on the other hand have a 38% ownership in 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.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Perpetual.

See our latest analysis for Perpetual

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Perpetual?

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 Perpetual 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 Perpetual, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Perpetual is not owned by hedge funds. Washington H. Soul Pattinson and Company Limited is currently the largest shareholder, with 12% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 7.3% and 5.2% of the stock.

A closer look at our ownership figures suggests that the top 22 shareholders have a combined ownership of 50% implying that no single shareholder has a majority.

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.

Insider Ownership Of Perpetual

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.