Institutional investors, are groups or organizations in which all members contribute towards a single fund on behalf of other people or corporations and use those funds to invest in a number of different financial vehicles and differing asset classes. The majority of institutional investments focus on ETF’s, Mutual funds, insurance funds as well as pension plans and banks.

The majority of financial assets in the US markets, are controlled by institutional investors, and have a large amount of influence in those markets. Over the last two decades, this influence has seen significant growth and can be seen by looking in depth at the concentration of ownership by institutional traders in the equity levels of publicly traded companies.

Institutional traders, reportedly own a majority share of the equity market capitalization at around 80%, and as the size and importance of many institutional traders grow, the percentage ownership of relative holdings and influence on the markets grows aswell.