Quelle: Rose & Company

Each month, we examine trends of interest using data from various sources. Custom analysis and reporting is available upon request.

Our chart of month for April attempts to recreate an OECD study from 2017 that examines institutional ownership across various regions based on a company’s primary exchange listing. We looked at institutional ownership as a percentage of total equity capital for the world’s 10,000 largest listed companies and how that has changed since the OECD study. Of the companies in our data set, an average of 72% of market value of companies listed on a United States exchange was owned by institutional investors. This was unchanged from the OECD data.

In stark contrast, an average of just 34% of the market value of companies listed on European exchanges was owned by institutional investors, a decline from 38% in the OECD study. That might not sound like a large change, but when you consider that aggregate market value of the European-listed companies in the data set is ~$16.9 trillion, a 4% change equates to an institutional outflow of just under $700 billion! While macroeconomic factors may play into this decline in institutional ownership, it seems very reasonable to assume that the roll out of MiFID II in 2018 was one of the largest contributing factors to the loss in institutional ownership.

Sources: OECD; FactSet Research Systems; Rose & Company