The Reddit trader who claimed to have earned tens of millions of dollars by leading an army of investors interested in recovering GameStop shares (a campaign framed as a confrontation between Main Street and Wall Street), lost $ 13 million on Tuesday as to actions of the people who were fighting the video game retailer retired.
Keith Gill, who is called “DeepF *** ingValue” on Reddit and “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube, revealed in a post on the WallStreetBets discussion forum that the value of his GameStop stakes had dropped to 7, $ 6 million. That was down from nearly $ 21 million the day before and up to $ 50 million last week, when GameStop shares reached $ 483 each.
On Tuesday, Gill tweeted about the image of a shock-looking kitten raising a paw to his face.
Gill still seems to be firmly black on his investment in GameStop. The brokerage statement the former MassMutual financial adviser posted on Reddit on Tuesday night showed a cash balance of about $ 13 million. He first publicly revealed that he was buying shares of GameStop in mid-2019. At the time, the shares were trading at just over $ 4 per share, while options to buy the shares cost about $ 50,000.
It’s likely that many average investors who rushed into GameStop shares and cheered each other on WallStreetBets ’RedSit forum haven’t made such a big profit. GameStop shares rose slightly on Wednesday to just over $ 93 as of noon. But the retailer’s stock price has fallen in the last week, losing more than 80% of its value and wiping out nearly $ 30 billion from GameStop investor accounts.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with other key regulators later this week to discuss GameStop’s volatile trading, as well as the shares of other so-called “meme stock” companies and even the price of silver, all apparently caught up in the recent commercial frenzy negotiated by social media.
Shares of AMC Entertainment also rose slightly on Wednesday, to nearly $ 8.50, after falling 40% on Tuesday. Shares of the former mobile device maker BlackBerry, another highly-cited value on WallStreetBets, rose just 14 cents on Wednesday to just under $ 12. Shares of the company had reached $ 28 last week.
Stock price movements are taking place amid growing evidence that some hedge funds have been playing on both sides of the GameStop drama. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Mudrick Capital, a $ 3 billion hedge fund, earned nearly $ 200 million by betting that shares of AMC and GameStop would increase last month. It has been previously reported that several hedge funds had been shortening or betting against GameStop and other stocks, contributing to the rises in the shares of these companies.
He is also concerned that the discussion about WallStreetBets will be interrupted by robots. CBS MoneyWatch reported Monday that discussion forum moderators had recently detected a “large amount” of bot activity in the content of stock recommendations posted to their group.