Key Insights

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

• 47% of the business is held by the top 25 shareholders

• Ownership research along with analyst forecasts data help provide a good understanding of opportunities in a stock

To get a sense of who is truly in control of IMCD N.V. (AMS:IMCD), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 54% 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. 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 IMCD, beginning with the chart below.

View our latest analysis for IMCD

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About IMCD?

Many institutions measure their performance against an index that approximates the local market. So they usually pay more attention to companies that are included in major indices.

We can see that IMCD 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 IMCD, (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. IMCD is not owned by hedge funds. Our data shows that FMR LLC is the largest shareholder with 10% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 9.3% and 4.0%, of the shares outstanding, respectively.

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.

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. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.