Key Insights

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

• 51% of the business is held by the top 5 shareholders

• Insiders have been selling lately

If you want to know who really controls Safety Insurance Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:SAFT), 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 80% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Given the vast amount of money and research capacities at their disposal, institutional ownership tends to carry a lot of weight, especially with individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Safety Insurance Group.

View our latest analysis for Safety Insurance Group

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Safety Insurance Group?

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 Safety Insurance Group 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 Safety Insurance Group, (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. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Safety Insurance Group. BlackRock, Inc. is currently the largest shareholder, with 14% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 12% and 11%, of the shares outstanding, respectively. In addition, we found that George Murphy, the CEO has 0.7% of the shares allocated to their name.

On looking further, we found that 51% of the shares are owned by the top 5 shareholders. In other words, these shareholders have a meaningful say in the decisions of 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. We're not picking up on any analyst coverage of the stock at the moment, so the company is unlikely to be widely held.