Who Controls Financial Markets in Canada? Individual vs Institutional Investors

Have you ever been annoyed at those breathless news reports on market moves? You know what they are - "investors today have been spooked/cheered by the quarterly inflation figures / credit crisis in Greece / nuclear incident / trade figures / royal wedding / hurricane / terrorist killing" etc (in fact, often it seems that the person writing the text merely attaches the market result, whatever it is, to the current headline news item of the day, good or bad. For those who believe that markets are random, the random association of events to ups and downs makes a certain sense I suppose.)

Anyhow, on reading these news reports, I find myself muttering that it wasn't me, I didn't do it! I have a portfolio apportioned amongst fixed percentages of various passive ETFs and I only trade when rebalancing, taking money out, or buying more. Even when I do trade, my amounts are so puny and I almost always place orders at market price, it cannot make a jot of difference to move markets up or down.

So who does have enough heft in the market to influence things, individual or institutional investors? Are there a few super-rich individual investors with enough money to manipulate things, or is it the mass of ordinary Canadians? Are the mainstream mutual funds the heavyweights or is it the pension funds? It seems to be really difficult to find out through simple Googling but here is what I found out, with admitted uncertainty through some of the guesstimation I've had to do. This is all 2009 data, which seems to be the most common recent data available. The grand total of financial assets in 2009 was $1713.3 billion. Here is the breakdown of who more or less controls or decides how to invest the money (as opposed to who it may belong to or for whose benefit it is being invested).

1) Pension Funds - $898.1 billion 52% share
This is only the top 102 funds - the 100 biggest from the Benefits Canada 2010 report plus the two biggest funds of all in Canada, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec ($131.6 billion in net assets) and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board ($105.5 billion). Interesting fact - these two plus the top 10 of the Benefits Canada list are all government or public servant plans and together they control about 1/3 of total financial assets in Canada. Reminds one of an old joke ... "what is the difference between capitalism and communism? ... capitalism is the exploitation of man by man while communism is the reverse".

2) Mutual Funds - $595.2 billion, 35% share
(source IFIC reports)

3) The Mega-Rich $140 billion and the Quite Rich guesstimate. $40 billion, combined 11% share
The Mega-Rich cutoff in 2009 was $1 billion for the 55 richest Canadians (see Wikipedia List of Canadians by net worth). For the Quite Rich I had to guess that the next 100, down to about $200 million in assets, might hold around $40 billion in total at an average $400 million each.

4) The Hoi Polloi (that's you and me the retail investor) - $40 billion, 2% share
I'm being optimistic here I think, assigning an average $1200 in directly held investments of stocks, bonds and ETFs (i.e. not owned within pensions or mutual funds) or so to each of the remaining 33 million Canadians. For comparison, consider that the total market value of Canadian ETFs in 2009 was $33.7 billion according to TMX Money.

Let's put a personal face on it. Today when the TSX go down or up we can point the finger at Michael Sabia (Caisse CEO), David Denison (CPPIB) or maybe Jim Leech (OTPP). One thing for sure, it wasn't me.

PS came across figures for the USA ... John Bogle said in the Wall Street Journal in Jan. 2010 that insititutional investors control 70% of US shares, with mutual funds 26%, private pension plans 11% and government pension plans 9%.