Key Insights

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

• The top 6 shareholders own 52% of the company

• Insiders have been buying lately

If you want to know who really controls AMREP Corporation (NYSE:AXR), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are institutions with 43% 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. Hence, having a considerable amount of institutional money invested in a company is often regarded as a desirable trait.

Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about AMREP.

Check out our latest analysis for AMREP

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About AMREP?

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 AMREP 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 AMREP, (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 AMREP. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Albert Russo with 16% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 10% and 9.6%, of the shares outstanding, respectively. Additionally, the company's CEO Christopher Vitale directly holds 1.9% of the total shares outstanding.

We did some more digging and found that 6 of the top shareholders account for roughly 52% of the register, implying that along with larger shareholders, there are a few smaller shareholders, thereby balancing out each others interests somewhat.

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. Our information suggests that there isn't any analyst coverage of the stock, so it is probably little known.