What You Must Know About Rubicon Technology Inc’s (NASDAQ:RBCN) Major Investors

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In this article, I’m going to take a look at Rubicon Technology Inc’s (NASDAQ:RBCN) latest ownership structure, a non-fundamental factor which is important, but remains a less discussed subject among investors. The impact of a company’s ownership structure affects both its short- and long-term performance. Differences in ownership structure of companies can have a profound effect on how management’s incentives are aligned with shareholder returns, which is why we’ll take a moment to analyse RBCN’s shareholder registry.

View our latest analysis for Rubicon Technology

NasdaqCM:RBCN Ownership_summary May 25th 18
NasdaqCM:RBCN Ownership_summary May 25th 18

Institutional Ownership

In RBCN’s case, institutional ownership stands at 29.62%, significant enough to cause considerable price moves in the case of large institutional transactions, especially when there is a low level of public shares available on the market to trade. Although RBCN has a high institutional ownership, such stock moves, in the short-term, are more commonly linked to a particular type of active institutional investors – hedge funds. Hedge funds, considered active investors, hold a 14.64% stake in the company, which may be the cause of high short-term volatility in the stock price. I am going to further examine RBCN’s ownership structure to check how other major shareholders can affect its investment case.

Insider Ownership

I find insiders are another important group of stakeholders, who are directly involved in making key decisions related to the use of capital. In essence, insider ownership is more about the alignment of shareholders’ interests with the management. RBCN insiders hold a not-so-significant 3.05% stake in the company, which somewhat aligns their interests with that of shareholders. However, a higher level of insider ownership has been linked to management executing on high-returning projects instead of expansion projects for the sake of apparent growth. In addition to this, it may be interesting to look at insider buying and selling activities. Keep in mind that buying may be sign of upbeat future expectations, but selling doesn’t necessarily mean the opposite as the insiders might just be doing it out of their personal financial needs.

NasdaqCM:RBCN Insider_trading May 25th 18
NasdaqCM:RBCN Insider_trading May 25th 18

General Public Ownership

The general public holds a substantial 52.68% stake in RBCN, making it a highly popular stock among retail investors. This size of ownership gives retail investors collective power in deciding on major policy decisions such as executive compensation, appointment of directors and acquisitions of businesses. This level of ownership gives retail investors the power to sway key policy decisions such as board composition, executive compensation, and potential acquisitions. This is a positive sign for an investor who wants to be involved in key decision-making of the company.

Next Steps:

With significant institutional ownership, including active hedge, existing investors should seek a margin of safety when investing in RBCN. This is to avoid getting trapped in a sustained sell-off that is often observed in stocks with this level of institutional participation. However, if you are building an investment case for RBCN, ownership structure alone should not dictate your decision to buy or sell the stock. Instead, you should be evaluating company-specific factors such as the intrinsic valuation, which is a key driver of Rubicon Technology’s share price. I urge you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:

  1. Financial Health: Is RBCN’s operations financially sustainable? Balance sheets can be hard to analyze, which is why we’ve done it for you. Check out our financial health checks here.

  2. Past Track Record: Has RBCN been consistently performing well irrespective of the ups and downs in the market? Go into more detail in the past performance analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of RBCN’s historicals for more clarity.

  3. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.
To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.

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