Key Insights

• Institutions' substantial holdings in RBB Bancorp implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price

• The top 12 shareholders own 50% of the company

• Insiders own 24% of RBB Bancorp

If you want to know who really controls RBB Bancorp (NASDAQ:RBB), 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 34% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

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 RBB Bancorp, beginning with the chart below.

See our latest analysis for RBB Bancorp

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About RBB Bancorp?

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.

RBB Bancorp already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. 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 RBB Bancorp, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

It looks like hedge funds own 9.9% of RBB Bancorp shares. That catches my attention because hedge funds sometimes try to influence management, or bring about changes that will create near term value for shareholders. FJ Capital Management, LLC is currently the largest shareholder, with 9.9% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 8.1% and 7.2%, of the shares outstanding, respectively.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 12 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

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 plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.