Originally Posted by
TipTanks
Exactly.
Let's look at one single Vanguard Fund - VTSAX
As of September 30, 2021 VTSAX held 3,065,028 shares. (That's the quickest number I could find. Lazy googling.) VTSAX is an index fund, so it holds its shares by market cap weight passively, on autopilot based on something called the CRSP index.
Based on today's stock price, those shares are worth about $71million. The total market cap of save is $2.4billion, so that means that one Vanguard index fund owns about 3% of the company.
First of all read the prospectus:
Principal Investment Strategies
The Fund employs an indexing investment approach designed to track the performance of the CRSP US Total Market Index, which represents approximately 100% of the investable U.S. stock market and includes large-, mid-, small-, and micro-cap stocks regularly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The Fund invests by sampling the Index, meaning that it holds a broadly diversified collection of securities that, in the aggregate, approximates the full Index in terms of key characteristics.
Even mighty Vanguard does not REALLY passively invest. If they did they would have a pro rata share of ALL companies based upon their market capitalization. They would have never acquired 3% (far less 9%) of SAVE without having a similar capitalization percentage of everyone else, which they obviously don’t. If they ever did set up a computer program to do that the small lot charges would eat them alive. They APPROXIMATE the CRSP by CHOOSING stocks that they believe represent asset classes. And that’s just the index funds. Most Vanguard funds ( not the biggest perhaps) are actively managed.
But none of that matters to the point I was making which is that with ~ 60% institutionally held AND a poison pill NK is an unlikely target for a hostile buy out.
My other point, that we should treat our newbies better if we want to keep them you and I can still disagree about, but with even MESA giving their newbies a $20k bonus just for passing IOE, our first year remuneration is looking increasingly embarrassing.
FUPME might be a mantra some believe appropriate directed at management, it shouldn’t be how we treat our junior pilots - not if we expect them to stay.