Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is seeing its share price surge today on the back of stellar earnings and positive analyst sentiment. Since it is a very popular and heavily traded stock, it made us wonder, who really owns Amazon? Well, according to TipRanks’ ownership page, it’s mostly owned by public companies and individual investors at 55.49%, followed by mutual funds, other institutional investors, and insiders at 17.98%, 16.85%, and 9.68%, respectively.
Taking a closer look at the numbers, insider Jeff Bezos is Amazon’s largest shareholder, with an approximate holding value of $120 billion. Over the past 12 months, other Amazon insiders have been mostly selling shares. However, it’s worth mentioning that this is uninformative auto selling that is most likely tied to compensation packages rather than negative company outlooks.
Do Hedge Funds Own Amazon?
Hedge funds do own shares of Amazon. Interestingly, though, it appears that they have a very negative view of it, as they reduced their AMZN holdings by 8.2 million shares in the last quarter. However, it’ll be interesting to see how this changes following the company’s latest earnings results.
Of all the hedge fund managers tracked by TipRanks, Ken Fisher has the largest position in Amazon on an absolute basis at roughly $5.3 billion. This equates to about 2.93% of his total portfolio. On the other hand, five-star rated hedge fund manager Mark Thomas Massey appears to have much more conviction in Amazon.
Indeed, his $665 million position makes up almost 16% of his portfolio, the highest percentage amount of all the fund managers tracked by TipRanks. However, it is worth mentioning that he also reduced his position in the previous quarter.
Nevertheless, the institutional selling did not discourage individual investors, who have a positive view of the company. In fact, out of the 696,538 portfolios tracked by TipRanks, 18.9% hold AMZN stock. In addition, the average portfolio weighting allocated towards AMZN among those who do have a position is 12.18%. This suggests that investors of the company are fairly confident about its future.
Is Amazon a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 42 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average AMZN price target of $175.81 per share implies 36.74% upside potential.
