Retail owns over 500M shares

Not financial advice. The TL;DR is the title.

I was reading this post by u/ButthurtFeminists about GME shares bought in Korea since April 1st and got really excited because that article gives us a datapoint that we can use to cross reference with Bloomberg terminal data and use to do some exciting math! Read that first so that the rest of this makes sense.

If we look at the -16.7% they reported and assume a close price of ~$160, that means they’re looking at the $237M spent to buy GME shares using an initial price point of ~$192 (I’m ignoring cents because we don’t know the exact end price point they’re using to calculate the loss). So let’s look at the 237M with the price point of $192 for the sake of being conservative in our estimates (also, the price range on April 1 was $183.60 - $196.97, so we’re within that range), that gives us 1.2M shares purchased in Korea since April 1.

Now, if we take that and compare it to the most recent Bloomberg terminal drop from u/Ravada and look at the 4th image which has the ownership summary, we can see that Korea isn’t listed there. If we’re super conservative and assume that the “Unknown” location is entirely made up of Korea’s ownership, then that puts total shares owned across all countries at a measly 20.2M. We know this is wrong, because on that same screenshot we see that institutions are currently reported to own 115.09% of 70M shares (~80.6M). So then let’s assume that the ownership in Korea is actually not large enough to have it show up in these top 9 locations listed. The % owned by these 9 locations adds up to 99.73% of ownership (which leaves 0.27% of shares held in other locations), with the bottom on the list being Ireland owning 0.2% of the shares. Again, let’s be conservative and assume that Korea’s holdings would actually put it next on the list with 0.19% of all shares, then that means the total ownership across all countries is 649.7M shares owned.

And we said earlier that institutions are currently reported as owning 80.6M, right? And if we check the insider ownership as listed at whalewisdom then we can see that according to last reports, insiders own ~17.4M shares. So then 649.7M shares minus institutional holdings and insider holdings leaves us with ~551.7M shares held by retail.

(Is there anyone else I should be including in the ownership here? Let me know and I can edit that in.)

Some important notes:

• The price quickly dropped at the beginning of April so the number of shares purchased throughout the month was likely much higher since many would have likely bought in closer to the $160-$165 price point that we saw for most of the month instead of $192.
• This assumes that all of the shares held in Korea were exclusively purchased as of April 1, which I think we can all agree is probably bullshit and actually only represents a fraction of shares held.
• This assumes that none of the shares purchased in Korea since April 1 were sold. This one is debatable and we have no proof one way or the other, but I don’t think it’s likely that many people would have sold. You can make your own assumptions here.
• I’m not sure if the article was showing -16.7% as an average loss across GME purchases or simply as a price decrease per share since April 1, but I suspect the latter.
• Bloomberg terminal data is generally dated and kind of garbage because there’s such a lag on when institutions report things, but it’s still a valuable comparison point.

Edit: another note, it's possible that Korea makes up only a portion of the "Unknown" location, so that they represent more than the 0.19% I used above. It would be hella weird, but it's possible. IDFK what's in the "Unknown" location but would love an explanation if anyone has one.

Edit 2: this excellent comment from u/originalGooberstein is important as it highlights why Korea might actually be a subset of “Unknown”

I assumed Australia and the rest of South East Asia would have been lumped into "Unknown". Mainly because my broker piggy backs off a broker that operates out of Singapore. It might be worth checking how you access the US market to figure out which country you are lumped into.