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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 9220793" data-attributes="member: 72555">80% of all trades are done by institutions, not individual investors making trades.   And 50% of stock is owned by under 1% of the population in the USA.This isn't democracy.  In the stock market, dollars vote, not people.  The vast majority of trades are done by professional traders, and the vast majority of owned shares are managed by professional traders.Corporate Governance isn't determined by who owns the stock, it is determined by who controls how the stock votes.  And that is institutional professionals for the most part, with a dash of a few hyper-rich.  Even if the stock is majority owned by relatively poor (99%) individuals who all agree on one thing, the organizational cost of getting them to coordinate is too high for it to matter.And the culture of those investors really matters.  They both decide who picks the CEO (the board) and they collectively decide what the price of the stock should be.  If they have a collective bias, they can make the market behave irrationally; in order to profit from that irrationality, you either need really long-term patience or a huge amount of capital.Individual investors collectively demonstrated this with Gamestop.  They "irrationally" propped up the price, and no set of institutional investors could bring it back down, causing a bunch of professional traders to lose their shirt on options.  In the long term, Gamestop might be doomed, but irrational retail investors having fun where able to move its price 10x higher than it "should" be (according to professional shorts) for months.In any case, the top 1% of investors by any measure own more than half of the stock.</blockquote>

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