A look at the shareholders of Gold Standard Ventures Corp (TSE:GSV) can tell us which group is most powerful. Institutions often own shares in more established companies, while it's not unusual to see insiders own a fair bit of smaller companies. Companies that have been privatized tend to have low insider ownership.

Gold Standard Ventures is not a large company by global standards. It has a market capitalization of CA$327m, which means it wouldn't have the attention of many institutional investors. Our analysis of the ownership of the company, below, shows that institutions are noticeable on the share registry. We can zoom in on the different ownership groups, to learn more about Gold Standard Ventures.

See our latest analysis for Gold Standard Ventures

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Gold Standard Ventures?

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.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Gold Standard Ventures. 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. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see Gold Standard Ventures's historic earnings and revenue, below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.

We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Gold Standard Ventures. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Newmont Corporation with 12% of shares outstanding. With 11% and 7.3% of the shares outstanding respectively, FCMI Financial Corp., Asset Management Arm and FMR LLC are the second and third largest shareholders. In addition, we found that Jonathan Awde, the CEO has 1.2% of the shares allocated to his name

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

While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. There is a little analyst coverage of the stock, but not much. So there is room for it to gain more coverage.