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I'm trying to get a feeling for how important psychology is compared to fundamentals of a company (e.g. how much revenue they make) for the price of shares of the company on the stock market.

I think that nonprofessional investors (let's say people who have a total of less than 1 million USD in the stock market) make their investment decisions almost exclusively on gut feeling: They read about something in the news, make rather direct conclusions (e.g. Germany increases military spending -> invest into German military companies) and mostly don't look at small companies or at the fundamentals of a company, if they are not big in the news.

Is it known how big of an influence nonprofessional investors have combined?

The only event where they mattered which I know of for sure is /r/wallstreetbets with GameStop.

I'm looking for a specific stock market and some point in time for the distribution how many investors held which amount of value in USD in their portfolio. Was something like that published?

What I found

  • Neobrokers (worldwide?) are projected to have a total of USD 1,036.00bn assets under management (source). I assume all of those are nonprofessional investors
  • Global Assets under management are expected to rise to USD 145,400.00bn (source). If all nonprofessionals used neobrokers (which is not the case), then non-professionals would own 0.7%; meaning only the most well-known shares (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, nvidia, Shell, ...) or very special cases like GameStop could ever see their price being significantly impacted by nonprofessional developers.
Martin Thoma
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About 80% of the market is owned by institutional investors. That means that only 20% of the market is owned by individual, retail investors.

And according to a 2019 Harvard Business Review article:

One of either Blackrock, Vanguard, or State Street is the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 companies. They are the three largest owners of most DOW 30 companies.

So individual investors have a relatively small impact on the market. They also don't have much voting power as shareholders.

The GameStop incident showed that a small group of individual investors can potentially have an oversize influence on a single stock. But it would probably be much less feasible for them to move the overall market.

Barmar
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One thing your premise ignores is that most retail investors make no investment decisions. And no I have no source for this. Most choose mutual funds or ETFs to invest in and their management teams makes the decisions on their behalf (or not in the case of index funds). Most have no skill or interest in choosing stocks and are better off paying someone to do so on their behalf (through the small cost of the fund).

Here in the US most retirement funds offer no way to purchase shares directly, and they only offer a small choice of funds. In fact a popular option are "Target date funds" where you pick the year you are likely to retire and it automatically becomes more conservative as that date approaches.

So "picking a company based on gut" is not something most retail investors engage in.

Pete B.
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