To get a sense of who is truly in control of Fulgent Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLGT), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 54% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Since institutional have access to huge amounts of capital, their market moves tend to receive a lot of scrutiny by retail or 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 Fulgent Genetics.

See our latest analysis for Fulgent Genetics

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Fulgent Genetics?

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.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Fulgent Genetics. 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 Fulgent Genetics' earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Institutional investors own over 50% of the company, so together than can probably strongly influence board decisions. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Fulgent Genetics. The company's CEO Ming Hsieh is the largest shareholder with 29% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 13% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 4.7% by the third-largest shareholder.

To make our study more interesting, we found that the top 4 shareholders control more than half of the company which implies that this group has considerable sway over the company's decision-making.

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