Key Insights

• Significantly high institutional ownership implies U.S. Bancorp's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions

• 50% of the business is held by the top 25 shareholders

• Insiders have been selling lately

A look at the shareholders of U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB) can tell us which group is most powerful. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 79% 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. 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 U.S. Bancorp.

View our latest analysis for U.S. Bancorp

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About U.S. Bancorp?

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 U.S. Bancorp. 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. 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 U.S. Bancorp, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Since institutional investors own more than half the issued stock, the board will likely have to pay attention to their preferences. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in U.S. Bancorp. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is currently the largest shareholder, with 8.7% of shares outstanding. With 7.0% and 4.4% of the shares outstanding respectively, BlackRock, Inc. and MUFG Bank, Ltd.,Investment Banking Arm are the second and third largest shareholders.

A deeper look at our ownership data shows that the top 25 shareholders collectively hold less than half of the register, suggesting a large group of small holders where no single shareholder has a majority.

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. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.