Stock Market Participants

1. Owners and insiders
- majority shareholders who manage the company (except those GLCs who are managed by salaried directors and executives)
- normally they do not trade their shares and will not simply sell their shares to lose control of their companies, unless they want to dispose the company
- they can support their share price through share buy back scheme
- will use proxies if they want to use insider information to trade

2. Institutional Investors
2a. Government linked investment funds (GLIC)
- Tabung Haji, PNB, Khazanah, EPF etc
- key players in supporting the index
- may invest in small and mid caps fundamentally sound stocks, and normally do not trade the stocks
- use by government to manage the FBMKLCI by trading in the index linked stocks

2b. Local institutional funds
- managed by salaried professionals fund managers
- hold and trade index linked stocks and fundamental stocks that are active as a result of analyst reporting on performance and theme play
- predictable what they will do, if one has a good grasp of fundamentals of a company
- guided by standard operation procedures, and cannot speculate to gamble with fund holders' money
- will manipulate the market by switching a stock from one fund to another

2c. Foreign funds
- buying and selling in big caps and index linked stocks very fast and have a big impact on the overall market
- Their participation could be mainly due to external factors, and they enter with large block orders, thus pushing up the price, and they exit in large blocks too, pushing down the price that GLIC may not be able to absorb all.

2d. Hedge funds
- they had been in speculative penny stocks
- they buying in and selling out very fast and have a big impact on the price of the stocks they trade

3. Stock Syndicates
- groups and individuals with lots of capital for speculative play of accumulation and distribution.
- the smart money will accumulate and distribute stocks by manipulating the stock price using news and company information.
- they may have connection to analysts or insiders, or brokers
- may hold substantial number of shares to move the market, but their holdings will be spread to many members with holding not more than 5% to avoid their activities being detected by the Bursa listing requirement of making an announcement in transactions.

4. Retail investors/traders - diverse personalities
4a. The knowledgeable and smart 5%
- professionals who are managing funds for high net worth individuals
- they are the winners

4b. Those who have learnt some basic fundamental and/or technical analysis
- they can be winners at times and losers at times - most likely holds many stocks in their portfolio

4c. Those who use their instinct to trade
- they will only buy when market is bearish and sell when bullish
- they are the winners because they are the patient ones.

4c. Gamblers and punters
- always active in the market playing on margin - they are losers over a long term

4d. Small players who just follow others
- so called "auntie uncle" who will emerge when the market is bullish
- they could form the majority in the big crowd - they are likely small losers holding their savings in stocks