Shareholder Structure of Major Technology Companies: A Graph Analytics Study during COVID-19 and Beyond

ABSTRACT

During financial crises or other unexpected events, investors often seek to include lower-risk assets in their portfolios. Some assets are more sensitive than others to such phenomena. In the equities markets, adjustments tend to be made to the shareholdings of companies that are associated with a higher level of uncertainty. In this work, we explore the evolution of shareholder structure of various well-known companies in the technology sector during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We model, as graphs, shareholder ownership data about twenty US-listed companies between 2020 and 2022. We use freely available tools to explore the bipartite interactions and generate a wide range of topologies that facilitate the identification of how shareholding structures have evolved during the pandemic. In addition, we study the role that some nodes play in the network topology and the process of change that is observed. Our findings include that (1) most investors reduced the amount invested in technology stocks during the pandemic and that these investments tended to bounce back in the post-pandemic era;(2) Vanguard Group, Inc., is the most influential investor in the network;(3) Apple has the highest market capitalization of all technology stocks for all quarters in this study, Microsoft Corp has a significantly lower market capitalization, but a significantly higher number of investors;and (4) While investors for Apple and Microsoft tend to be from London and New York, companies such as Oracle have investors from a variety of locations. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).