A look at the shareholders of BankFinancial Corporation (NASDAQ:BFIN) can tell us which group is most powerful. We can see that retail investors own the lion's share in the company with 34% ownership. That is, the group stands to benefit the most if the stock rises (or lose the most if there is a downturn).
Meanwhile, institutions make up 32% of the company's shareholders. Generally speaking, as a company grows, institutions will increase their ownership. Conversely, insiders often decrease their ownership over time.
Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of BankFinancial, beginning with the chart below.
View our latest analysis for BankFinancial
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.
BankFinancial already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. 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. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see BankFinancial's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.
It would appear that 20% of BankFinancial shares are controlled by hedge funds. That catches my attention because hedge funds sometimes try to influence management, or bring about changes that will create near term value for shareholders. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is M3F, Inc. with 9.7% of shares outstanding. With 6.9% and 6.8% of the shares outstanding respectively, BankFinancial Corp. ESOP and AllianceBernstein L.P. are the second and third largest shareholders. In addition, we found that F. Gasior, the CEO has 2.6% of the shares allocated to their name.
On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 9 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.