Institutional investor
An institutional investor is an entity that pools money to purchase securities, real property, and other investment assets or originate loans.
[3] The potential of institutional investors in infrastructure markets is increasingly noted after the financial crises in the early twenty-first century.
[4] Roman law ignored the concept of juristic person, yet at the time the practice of private evergetism (which dates to, at least, the 4th century BC in Greece) sometimes led to the creation of revenues-producing capital which may be interpreted as an early form of charitable institution.
In some African colonies in particular, part of the city's entertainment was financed by the revenue generated by shops and baking-ovens originally offered by a wealthy benefactor.
[7] Alongside some Christian monasteries[8] the waqfs created in the 10th century AD are amongst the longest standing charities in the world (see for instance the Imam Reza shrine).
Following the spread of monasteries, almshouses and other hospitals, donating sometimes large sums of money to institutions became a common practice in medieval Western Europe.
The importance of lay and religious institutional ownership in the pre-industrial European economy cannot be overstated, they commonly possessed 10 to 30% of a given region arable land.
In the 18th century, private investors pool their resources to pursue lottery tickets and tontine shares allowing them to spread risk and become some of the earliest speculative institutions known in the West.
Following several waves of dissolution (mostly during the Reformation and the Revolutionary period) the weight of the traditional charities in the economy collapsed; by 1800, institutions solely owned 2% of the arable land in England and Wales.
[12] New types of institutions emerged (banks, insurance companies), yet despite some success stories, they failed to attract a large share of the public's savings and, for instance, by 1950, they owned 48% of US equities and certainly even less in other countries.
[14] Further, large US institutional investors may qualify to purchase certain securities generally restricted from retail investment under Rule 144A.
In Canada, companies selling to accredited investors can be exempted from regulatory reporting by each of the provincial Canadian Securities Administrators.
Moreover, institutional investors' role as financial intermediaries means they operate under different organizational structures and regulatory frameworks compared to individual blockholders.
[citation needed] These include: In the UK, institutional investors may play a major role in economic affairs, and are highly concentrated in the City of London's square mile.
