Think Nice Things or Suffer a Bad $TRIP

Institutional Owners – We need to look at the marginal investors and consider what it might look like if they behaved in concert. We need to know how many investors as a percentage of the whole are capable of realistically changing their minds and selling down.

We can see a table of the main holders of Trip Advisor’s shares on their website which highlights the largest holders.

As a quick aside, the below table highlights the style of managers invested in TripAdvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP):

Source: Trip Advisor Website 17th December 2018

How ridiculous is the investing world that all of these types of investors can claim that Trip Advisor meets their “style”. Aggressive growth?Deep value? VC/Private Equity and Income! (Trip Advisor has not distributed dividends ever). Marketing in all its wonder.

Anyway, coming back to the analysis, looking at the list of individual holders of Trip Advisor below:

Source: Trip Advisor Website

We can see a lot of investment managers and hedge funds. Vanguard, most of the Blackrockholding and SSGA, I would imagine, are the passive holdings. As a result, we can assume that there is not likely to be a sea change of sentiment from these holders. Along with Liberty, they add up to just over 30% of the shares of Trip Advisor. The majority of the rest is held by asset managers, hedge funds and investment banks and are likely to be balancing on their bull case which is discussed throughout this note or which is driven by analyst sentiment.