Just how much of the market do retail investors control? I thought they were a drop in the bucket.

Also, is there a way to know how much of the total volume of shares is being traded now? If I kept hyping my company (successfully), and drove the share price from $10 to $1000, thanks to retail hype, I could 100x the value of my company lets say from $100m to $10B, while the amount of money actually changing hands would be miniscule in comparison.

This is the real note - if the company was truly valuable, they wouldn't IPO, they'd get slurped up by someone big.

Modern IPOs are mainly dumping on retail and index investors.