Key Insights

• L.S. Starrett's significant individual investors ownership suggests that the key decisions are influenced by shareholders from the larger public

• 51% of the business is held by the top 17 shareholders

• 42% of L.S. Starrett is held by Institutions

If you want to know who really controls The L.S. Starrett Company (NYSE:SCX), 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 individual investors with 44% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Individual investors gained the most after market cap touched US$101m last week, while institutions who own 42% also benefitted.

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

View our latest analysis for L.S. Starrett

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About L.S. Starrett?

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 L.S. Starrett 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. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It's therefore worth looking at L.S. Starrett's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Hedge funds don't have many shares in L.S. Starrett. The company's largest shareholder is GAMCO Investors, Inc., with ownership of 11%. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 5.4% and 4.9% of the stock. Furthermore, CEO Douglas Starrett is the owner of 2.2% of the company's shares.

A closer look at our ownership figures suggests that the top 17 shareholders have a combined ownership of 51% implying that no single shareholder has a majority.

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. We're not picking up on any analyst coverage of the stock at the moment, so the company is unlikely to be widely held.

Insider Ownership Of L.S. Starrett

The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.