Seven trillion dollars of corporate power is currently held by Collective Investment Trusts that never have to tell the public how they vote on major company decisions.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
Shadow Shareholders: The Emergence of Collective Investment Trusts as Institutional Owners
SSRN · 6661438
The Takeaway
Collective Investment Trusts now control massive stakes in companies like Nvidia and Meta. Most people believe that mutual funds and public filings track where institutional power lies in the stock market. These shadow entities have quietly overtaken traditional funds in many retirement plans while operating under much looser disclosure rules. This shift means that a handful of private managers can influence the direction of the global economy without any outside oversight or accountability. Regular investors are essentially flying blind regarding who is actually steering the companies they own.
From the abstract
This Article traces the growth of "collective investment trusts" (CITs) as institutional investors with the power to influence capital markets and corporate governance while avoiding the glare of U.S. securities laws. While there is extensive scholarship on the rise of institutional investors generally, and mutual funds in particular, such scholarship has overlooked the emergence of CITs as the pooled investment vehicles that have been rapidly replacing mutual fund investments in public and priv