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Is there a resource that lists the shareholders of a public company, preferably if it included the quantity of shares each shareholder owns.

Something like eTrade's "Insider Activity" tab when viewing a particular company, except listing all public shareholders.

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What country are you looking for? – C. Ross♦ Aug 30 '12 at 14:04

3 Answers

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The list of the public companies is available on the regulatory agencies' sites usually (for example, in the US, you can look at SEC filings). Otherwise, you can check the stock exchange listings, which show all the public companies traded on that exchange.

The shareholders, on the other hand, are normally not listed and not published. You'll have to ask the company, and it probably won't tell you (and won't even know them all as many shares are held in the "street name" of the broker).

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Yeah I was specifically interested in the list of investors for companies I already know about. That's a shame, but expected. – anxiety Aug 29 '12 at 22:19
@anxiety, in Australia you can get such information from company share registries, but you have to pay for the information. That is how certain individuals or companies get shareholder's information and send them bogus off market offers for their shares at a fraction of the current market price. They usually aim for novice mum and dad investors who don't have a clue what the real value of their shares are and who think that the offer is coming from the company they own shares in. – Victor Aug 29 '12 at 23:55
Unless you are trying to do something similar the information is not really that helpful. Most brokers or analyst sites will provide a list of the 10 or 20 largest shareholders for a certain companies and their share holdings. It also provides information on the activity of these big players, if they have recently bought or sold any of their shareholdings. This can be usefull in certain circumstances, as it gives you an indication of which of the big players are moving in and out of the stock. – Victor Aug 30 '12 at 0:01
My intention was to see some of the share traffic amongst the shareholders (who may not be the largest shareholders) at a company that recently went public. I figure if you see a trend in employee transactions it could speak towards if the investment is a good one or not. – anxiety Aug 30 '12 at 1:15
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There are several problems with trying to get this data:

  • The company doesn't know. The investors are insiders, employees, and regular people. But the investments are held as individual shares via the company, and brokerages. But they are also held through index funds, actively traded mutual funds, ETFs.
  • There is no central repository of all this data.
  • The data, even if available, would be highly perishable. Every second the data would change. Sell your shares in a mutual fund and you no longer are an investor in company X.
  • Without a central repository of the data, conflation would be a big problem. You would never be able to cross reference the data between the different stores of data.
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No, there is no such list, as the other answers mention it is practically impossible to compile one. However you can see the institutional investors of a public company. MSN Money has this information available in a fair amount of details. For example see the Institutional Investors of GOOG

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