How many dollars worth of GME have been DRS’d?

Billions of dollars

Ever since December 8, 2021, Q3 2021, GameStop has been publicly reporting the number of shares of GME that have been directly registered.

If you take that number of shares DRS’d and multiply by the trading price of GME on those dates, you get the following:

  • October 30, 2021 - $0.95 billion
  • January 29, 2022 - $0.87 billion
  • June 1, 2022 - $1.54 billion
  • July 30, 2022 - $2.42 billion
  • October 29, 2022 - $2.02 billion
  • January 28, 2023 - $1.69 billion
  • April 29, 2023 - $1.48 billion
  • July 29, 2023 - $1.65 billion

Unfortunately, as opposed to Reddit, Lemmy at this time does not allow for tables to be embedded into posts or comments, so here is an image of the data in a spreadsheet. The stock split is taken into account here.

At the peak we had $2.42 billion worth of GME directly registered. That’s 2.42 billion dollars raised by approximately 200,000 individual household investors, averaging approximately $12,000 per person.

Realistically, since the share price of GME was going down from the beginning of the DRS initiative until July 30, 2022, we can assume that the actual amount of money spent was likely more than 2.42 billion up to that point, but that the valuation went down because the share price went down.

$2.42 billion

There once was an interesting post on superstonk titled: The 3 BILLION Dollar Subreddit.

This post used the DRS estimate of 87.5 million shares DRS’d, but the true number reported by GameStop never achieved that height. So this post was a little bit off, but the principle idea remains valid.

Superstonk was a subreddit of GME investors that had put in some amount of money more than $2.42 billion to directly register shares of GME.

Some people still say things like “DRS doesn’t do anything”, or otherwise believe that it is a pointless endeavor. Personally I find this sentiment to be intellectually dishonest or lazy, and it does a major disservice to the actual billions of dollars that have been directly invested into this company by an army of roughly 200,000 individuals.

How can anyone ignore $2.4 billion dollars worth of interest? Imagine if a single individual came along and spent $2.4 billion on anything. It would be a very newsworthy event, and many people would hear about it.

Yet, mainstream media continues to pretend like DRS is not something that actually exists and that GameStop is a failing brick and mortar company from the 90s.

On the sentiment of “DRS is pointless”, think of this situation from the perspective of GameStop leadership.

If you were running this company, which situation would you prefer: one where 25% of the company was directly registered, or one where 0% of the company was directly registered?

Somehow, some way, however it happened, from the depths of the internet at least $2.4 billion dollars worth of shares of this company have been directly registered, and this is a new type of reality that has never existed before in the US stock market.

In due time, the value of DRS will be demonstrated to everyone.

LC tweet:

“One lesson learned from helping companies navigate their holdings in/through SVB: there can be a substantial difference between owning an asset and owning a right to an asset. The delta can show itself particularly in challenging times.”