Total # of shares held on April 15th, as calculated from shares held by Swedish broker
Yesterday one of the two large Swedish brokers, Avanza, announced that they would be doing a broker non-vote (after much complaining by persistent apes). Great news, but with the flurry of information they also leaked the total number of shares held by their customers at the vote cut-off date: approximately 332,000 shares.
The other major Swedish broker, Nordnet, has around the same number of GME holders, and there is no reason to assume that there is a large difference in the average number of shares per customer (like, for example, if they targeted an older or more wealthy demographic - from what I can tell by ads from Avanza and Nordnet they are similar in style). So it is a fairly safe assumption that the total number of shares held by Swedish apes on April 15th were 660,000 shares, with some error margin up or down.
Why is this interesting? Because in the Bloomberg terminal drop from that date (https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/msc80a/160421\_gme\_bloomberg\_terminal\_information/) Sweden is not in the top 10 of ownership by country. In the #10 spot we find Ireland (go Ireland!), with a whooping 0.21% of ownership. Let's generously assume that Sweden was in the #11 spot, with, say, 0.20% of ownership: If 660,000 shares is 0.2 % of the total number of owned shares, this means that there were 660,000/0.002 = 330 million shares held on April 15th! So ~73 million real shares, ~257 million synthetic/fake shares.
If Sweden is not in the #11 spot, but lower and with associated lower percentage of ownership, then the total number of shares increases. 330 million is a lower bound on total number of shares held (institutional + retail).
Caveat: The Bloomberg drop contains a line with "Unknown" geographical ownership at 7.15%. If shares held by either (or both) major Swedish brokers end up here then this analysis goes out the window.
Posted May 28, 2021, 6:59 AM UTC