This has been puzzling me for quite some time, can't figure it out. Not much puzzles me in the market. Since my IBD days I have tried to follow the I in CANSLIM, institutional ownership of shares. A company I follow has published numbers of like 19M shares http://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=zoes Nasdaq website lists the ownership percentage as 130%, which is up from 115%, total shares owned as like 25M. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/zoes/institutional-holdings How the heck can this be? How can there be 130% of the shares owned? I thank you for any sensible answer for this (or any conjecture). RNB
It is obviously not technically possible for any shareholder or category of shareholder to hold more than 100% of a company's outstanding shares. Therefore, when you see investment information websites reporting institutional holdings exceeding the 100% mark, something is wrong with the data. There are two likely sources that are responsible for the reporting errors. First, the figures in an institution's report correspond to an "institutional holdings date". These can differ somewhat among the various institutions holding a company's stock, resulting in differences that could impact the reported percentage for institutional holdings. The data presented is updated monthly with an approximate lag of four weeks. As a result, even a slight imprecision in the reporting dates among one or more institutions could throw off the count. Second, we checked with Ownership Analyzer, which provides data on institutional investors' holdings. Here's our summary of their take on the most likely cause of distorted institutional holdings percentages: Let's say that XYZ Company has 20 million shares outstanding and Institution A owns all 20 million. In a shorting transaction, Institution B borrows 5 million of these shares from Institution A and sells them to Institution C. If both A and C claim ownership of the shares shorted by B, the institutional ownership of XYZ could be reported as 25 million shares (20 + 5), or 125% (25/20). In cases where reported institutional ownership exceeds 100%, actual institutional ownership would have to be very high. While somewhat imprecise, this conclusion helps investors determine the degree of the impact that institutional purchases and sales could have on a company's stock. Source: Investopedia
I always wondered why such distortions are frequently seen, likely a combination of bad data concerning shares outstanding & double counting of shorted shares (which is NOT an error). Would be nice to have an authoritative source; I actually trade off of this data (short interest & float size) more than anything else. In fact, as market prices are the product of supply and demand, this is the only thing that matters to me in assessing an equity trade, well, that and silly little things such as market cap size (good luck w/ that AAPL long BTW)
Search the Edgar database to find out the correct ownership percentages... http://developer.edgar-online.com/faq#id301