Institutions' substantial holdings in First Financial Bankshares implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price

If you want to know who really controls First Financial Bankshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIN), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. The group holding the most number of shares in the company, around 58% to be precise, is institutions. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

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.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of First Financial Bankshares, beginning with the chart below.

Check out our latest analysis for First Financial Bankshares

Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index.

We can see that First Financial Bankshares 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. 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 First Financial Bankshares, (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. Hedge funds don't have many shares in First Financial Bankshares. BlackRock, Inc. is currently the company's largest shareholder with 12% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 12% and 9.9% of the stock. Additionally, the company's CEO F. Dueser directly holds 1.1% of the total shares outstanding.

Looking at the shareholder registry, we can see that 51% of the ownership is controlled by the top 11 shareholders, meaning that no single shareholder has a majority interest in the ownership.