The Reddit broker who claimed to have made tens of millions of dollars by leading an army of amateur investors to grab GameStop shares – a campaign framed as between Main Street and Wall Street – lost $ 13 million on Tuesday as fighter shares video game retailer backed off.
Keith Gill, who goes by the name “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 figure fell from nearly $ 21 million the previous day and as much as $ 50 million from last week, when GameStop’s stock peaked at $ 483 each.
On Tuesday, Gill tweeted the image of a kitten with a shocked look holding a paw over his face.
Gill still seems to be totally in the blue in his investment in GameStop. The broker’s statement that the former MassMutual financial advisor posted on Tuesday night on Reddit showed a cash balance of almost $ 13 million. He publicly revealed that he was buying GameStop shares in mid-2019. At the time, the shares traded for just over $ 4, while stock options cost about $ 50,000.
It is unlikely that many ordinary investors who ran for GameStop shares and applauded each other on the WallStreetBets Reddit forum have made such exaggerated profits. GameStop’s shares rose slightly on Wednesday, to just over $ 93 at noon. But the retailer’s stock price plummeted last week, losing more than 80% of its value and erasing nearly $ 30 billion from GameStop’s investor accounts.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with other important regulators later this week to discuss volatile trading on GameStop, as well as the shares of other companies called “meme stocks” and even the price of silver, all apparently involved in the recent commercial frenzy fueled by social media.
Shares in the AMC Entertainment movie network also rebounded on Wednesday, to nearly $ 8.50, after plummeting 40% on Tuesday. Shares of the former BlackBerry mobile device maker, another highly mentioned stock on WallStreetBets, rose just 14 cents on Wednesday, to just under $ 12. The company’s shares reached $ 28 last week.
Stock price movements are taking place amid mounting evidence that some hedge funds have represented both sides of the GameStop drama. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Mudrick Capital, a $ 3 billion hedge fund, made nearly $ 200 million by betting that AMC and GameStop shares would rise last month. It was previously reported that several hedge funds were shorting, or betting against, GameStop and other stocks, contributing to the spikes in the shares of these companies.
There are also concerns that the discussion about WallStreetBets is being interrupted by bots. CBS MoneyWatch reported on Monday that discussion forum moderators recently detected a “large amount” of bot activity in the stock recommendation content posted to their group.