Institutional Investors — Who Owns What?
Institutional investors often buy and sell substantial blocks of stocks, bonds, or other securities. As these groups are not technically retail investors, certain laws and regulations aren’t as strictly applied to them as others, as it is assumed that the institutional crowd is more knowledgeable than retailers, and thus they are able to protect themselves better. Buying and selling of large positions by institutional investors can create supply and demand imbalances that result in sudden price moves in stocks, bonds, or other assets, making institutional investors the sharks of Wall Street. Since institutional investors can move markets, retail investors often research institutional investors’ regulatory filings with the SEC to determine which securities the retail investors should buy personally. Essentially, this means that certain investors mimic their buying of the institutional crowd by taking ‘smart money.’
Both retail investors and institutional investors are active in a lot of markets, such as bonds, commodities, options, forex, futures contracts, and stocks. However, due to the nature of the securities, and the nature of the transactions, some markets are mainly for institutional investors rather than retail investors, such as swaps and forward markets.
The difference in trading is also seen by the amounts of stock that are bought and sold. Institutional investors tend to not invest in smaller companies, as they tend to buy and sell stocks in blocks of 10,000 shares or more, whereas retail investors buy and sell stocks in lots of 100 shares or more. Due to the high volume of purchases, institutional investors don’t tend to trade with smaller companies, as this high volume of stock can make the price susceptible to movement, in either a large increase or decrease, due to the supply and demand imbalance. These institutional investors also tend to avoid buying too much stock in companies, as this can cause them to be flagged by the SEC, due to the limits on the amount of voting shares that can be owned.
Who owns microsoft? Who do Vanguard Own?
As the graph from www.altsignals.ai shows us, the two biggest owners of Microsoft are Vanguard and Blackrock. Vanguard inc. have assets worth over 7 trillion, whilst Blackrock have over 9 trillion in assets. These big institutional investors can therefore potentially trade against each other, or create an imbalance in the supply and demand chain, causing prices to potentially rocket up.
The two biggest holdings that Vanguard have are in Microsoft and Apple, as shown by the www.altsignals.ai diagram. Over the past year, these stocks have gone up by 30% and 15% respectively. This increase of demand for stocks which are on the up means Vanguard can make a huge profit; as we can see from the Microsoft diagram, they sold around 3 million shares recently.
