[zemptime]

I can't directly speak for the autonomous groups of people in loose orbit around https://old.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ who can be labelled the apes (I know for sure there are other groups but this is an easily accessible one), but what I've observed:

Goals:

  Elimination of FTD's, period. Market participants who FTD regularly are ejected.
  Information symmetry between blob & retail - true regular reporting on short positions, Swaps, other derivatives. Teeth for this.
  Increase in reporting penalties to be less than a cost of doing business.
  T+3 Settlement to T+0.
  Widespread usage of implementations like IEX to eliminate profitability of low-latency arbitrage.

How:

  Routing orders through IEX
  Exiting brokers who are simply bad for retail (Robinhood)
  Withdrawing equities from the DTCC accounts and broker dealer system as a vote of no-confidence (GME recently stated 5m+ individual had directly registered their shares w/ transfer agent as of Oct 31... and put it on their 10-Q, making them only company I'm aware of to have done that in past year).
  Suing brokers/applying regulation pressure to those who don't allow basic rights (direct share registration from europe)
  Actual monitoring of which brokers are dipping their hands in their customer's cookie jars (see: Fidelity a couple months ago suddenly posting 10m+ shares available to borrow in a very illiquid stock. Where could those have come from? Customer's cash accounts? Oh, it's not *lending*, it's *posting as collateral*? etc)
  Signal boosting for existing, honorable efforts: Dennis Kelleher @ https://bettermarkets.org/ / Susanne Trimbath
  Awareness & localized support of legislation
  Filing FINRA complaints, getting in touch with compliance officers, actually watching & asking.

The beauty and confusion here is, you just have a lot of people learning and teaching each other. Over time, they learn more and do more things.

I'd say probably most valuable at this point in time is the mixture of identified and pseudonymous journalism increasing financial literacy/awareness of just how... pardon my french, fucking bad, the existing incentive structures are w/r/t regulators. Good example: https://upsidechronicles.com/2021/09/05/how-wall-street-shor...

Suspect most valuable long-term will be the mass direct registration of shares in individuals book names rather than beneficiary ownership through a broker. If/when the apes have directly registered all available shares, 1) any significant amount of continued trading volume in lit markets is fraudulent and you have a slam-dunk legal case. 2) GME could legally exit participating in the DTCC and move onto a crypto-run automated market maker which meets all of the above goals. Any synthetic GME positions floating around would have to be immediately and forcibly closed, and there's a lot of material research on how the real number of shares floating around might be on the order of magnitude of 1 billion. Big problems for the blob.