Institutional ownership includes entities like mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, venture capital firms, family trusts, and investment banks. Institutional ownership includes shares owned by an entity for its own account or exercising investment discretion over another account. The data is primarily from three sources: portfolio reports, notifications or announcements, and company annual reports.

Coverage

Note that complete ownership data starts around December 2004. Some data exists prior to that time in the database, but it has more holes and is not as consistently available across companies.

Timeliness

Ownership data is very fluid. A transaction can occur at any time, as can a formal portfolio or ownership report. Since we only expose aggregate data, an arbitrary period is used to snapshot the data. We use quarterly snapshots for institutional data. These quarters do not correspond to the company quarters. Instead, they are calendar year quarters ending on March 31, June 30, September 30 and December 31. The data for each quarter is lagged 45 days to avoid look-ahead biases as much as possible.

Percentage Ownership Note

It is possible for institutional ownership factors and functions that refer to total ownership to go above 100%. Among the factors that can cause this are timing factors, including recognition of transactions or shares counts in the underlying data; a large amount of short interest, restricted shares, or treasury shares; or, inconsistency in underlying reports, as with one number being expressed in diluted terms and another in basic terms.

Factors

Factors are used directly in rules or ranking nodes and do not require further modifications. See the first example for a rule in factor form.

Functions

Functions require parameters, contained in attached parentheses. Each of these functions has an offset, in three-month periods. See the second example for a rule using the function form.

Examples

To see companies with less institutional sales in the most recent three-month period compared to the one prior, use:

Inst#ShsSold < Inst#ShsSoldPQ

To see companies with a level of institutional ownership above that of the most recent 12-month average, use:

InstitutionalPctOwn(0) > LoopAvg("InstitutionalPctOwn(CTR)",4)