Hi Vsauce, Michael r/Superstonk, Kit here!

EDIT: Some smart apes in the comments have pointed out that a gaussian/normal distribution is likely not the best to use here so please take what I found with an extra grain of salt! I will try to look into other distributions that were recommended to see what those numbers might tell me.

Preamble ramblings

Over my course of the past 4 months in this GME saga (time really flies when you're being an ape!) I saw a few attempts at trying to gauge how many shares retail/reddit might hold, and most boiled down to "we have X members, let's assume everyone holds on average Y shares" with numbers seemingly plucked from thin air.

"No positions!", after all, and making anonymous votes might lead to fudged data, so of course best we can do is guess which painted a pretty nice picture. But we can try to do a little better.

I recently saw an influx of posts stating they kept buying more to go from XX to XXX, or from bigger players with XXX, XXXX or even beyond shares sharing their sentiment to hold past the peak so us smaller apelings (personally at XX) can come play with the kongs on the moon - which I just absolutely adore this community for ❤.

But I digress... given those postings I had an idea. Back during the r/GME subreddit/discord fiasco me and some individuals that were unhappy with the status quo split off. I made a small discord for us to hang out and have a smaller more tightly knit community...

A community where sharing positions is allowed and no one really has an incentive to lie in a poll

So that's what I did. Out of 78 members 51 have shared how many shares they own, which means we have a small but still somewhat statistically significant data set to play around with, so let's get into it!

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Playing with numbers

Looking at the data, first and foremost I was surprised how many XXX holders there were. Most estimates I saw were very conservative and assumed each ape holds maybe 10 shares on average. Well... here's the result of our server's sampling:

Sum of all answers	Amount of answers	Minimum	Maximum
9345.7528	51	1	3425
Average	Standard Deviation	low 0.1%	high 0.1%
183.2500549	507.8178267	-1340.203425	1706.703535

And as an image of the bell curve:

Normal distribution of shares for n=51, including outliers

"Kit why does this go into the negative? Are you saying people here short gme?" - No, it's a statistical model that in and of itself doesn't care for which numbers are reasonable and which aren't. Determining that is upon us as humans and of course people cannot own negative shares, so we can ignore that side of the bell curve. Second, you might have spotted the absolute gigakong holding 3425 shares. That's an outlier and the next biggest position would be 950 shares, so let's factor out our kong to see what the numbers would look like then:

Sum of all answers	Amount of answers	Minimum	Maximum
5920.7528	50	1	950
Average	Standard Deviation	low 0.1%	high 0.1%
118.415056	210.6755749	-513.6116686	750.4417806

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Normal distribution of shares for n=50, excluding outliers

Smaller average, obviously, but more importantly a smaller normal distribution, in other words the values are bunched closer together. Still quite nifty, but let's go ahead and really play devil's advocate here. As stated, we have 78 people in the server and 51 voted. Let us assume that the remaining 27 people, or ~34% of the population hold no shares whatsoever. If we apply this to r/Superstonk it would mean out of the roughly 250k members here, about 86,538 would not hold any shares. Unlikely, but as I said, I'm trying to play devil's advocate right now and get a lowball figure. So let's take a looksie! Again, the statistical outlier is excluded.

Sum of all answers	Amount of answers	Minimum	Maximum
5920.7528	77	0	950
Average	Standard Deviation	low 0.1%	high 0.1%
76.89289351	178.4681954	-458.5116926	612.2974797

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Normal distribution of shares for n=77, excluding outliers

...Wow! Assuming that the data sampled is representative of retail/reddit at large we're still looking at almost 77 shares on average per ape/ant! Of course, out in the wild there may be silent whales among us holding 4, 5 or even 6 digit amount of shares, same as there may be those that were only able to afford a fractional share, or 1 whole so I'd say it balances out.

So... does reddit own the float?

Excellent question! Let's take a look at The proxy materials for the upcoming shareholder meeting And we can see that "The total number of shares of our common stock outstanding as of April 15, 2021 was 70,771,778", if we now subtract from the shares outstanding the shares held by institutions and insiders we're left with the float that retail can trade with. Of course one can argue that institutions don't all have the shares locked up, they are able to sell and as such count towards the float, but let us put that aside for now and only consider the part of float actively in circulation.

Running the numbers puts us at 26,757,247 shares, plus the 3.5 million shares released by gamestop since, bumping the number up to 30,257,247 shares.

And now let's run our different averages from earlier against that number, assuming every member of this subreddit is holding shares.

r/Superstonk members	assumed average shares per member	assumed total amount of shares owned by r/Superstonk	estimated float	amount of float owned by r/Superstonk
250,000	76.89289351	19,223,223.3775	30,257,247	63.53%
250,000	118.415056	29,603,764	30,257,247	97.84%
250,000	183.2500549	45,812,513.725	30,257,247	151.41%

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TL;DR / conclusion

So there you have it folks, a conservative estimate would mean that this subreddit alone might already hold more than 63.53% of the float. There may be people not on the sub, people that aren't a member of the sub but only lurk and of course I'm trying to draw conclusions about a group of 250,000 people from a sample size of 51 so it may or may not be the most accurate, so take this with a grain of salt obviously.

But heck, I like how this looks.