Hello Doomsayers and Permabulls alike, This may not be the right forum for this, but I was looking for a place to find reliable data on %'s of holdings in U.S. equity markets, e.g. the % institutions like GS hold, and the % still dedicated to your run of the mill Cramerican. I would assume these numbers change often since institutions like to hold more at tops and less at bottoms Are these statistics available anywhere?
Recent numbers are a little hard to come by, because most data comes from university research which is generally aimed at historical hypotheses. Anyhow, in 2000, individual investors held about 40% of US equities privately. About 52% of that was owned by those categorized as "wealthy" individuals or millionaires. Everything else was made up of various institutions. Note that the 40% does not include individual holding in mutual funds, or pension funds. IT also doesn't include foreign investors. That is, of all the US equity held by US investors/firms, 40% of it is private US citizens. Those numbers came from the Wharton School of Finance.
To give you a bit better idea of the trends. More recent numbers show the following. Porportion of US equity held by households in private accounts: 1950 = 90.2% 1970 = 78.5% 1990 = 56.4% 2000 = 39% 2002 = 41.2% Pension funds and mutual funds hold the bulk of the remaining at about 20% each. Insurance companies and foreign households make up the rest. Citation; Worldwide Financial Reporting by George J. Benson