Roaring Kitty added to his already huge stake in GameStop and finally made moves on his call options — but investors weren’t very wowed.
Keith Gill, the meme stock booster and social media persona better known as Roaring Kitty, unloaded all 120,000 of his GameStop call options — and added 4 million new shares of the video game retailer, according to a screenshot of his portfolio shared on Reddit forum r/Superstonk late Thursday.
His now has a stake of 9,001,000 shares in the retailer, valued at $262 million as of Thursday’s closing price, the image showed.
Despite chatter on the social media platform around Gill’s biggest stock moves in weeks, GameStop’s stock was up only 4% in pre-market trading on Friday. Its shares closed up more than 14% on Thursday, bringing the price of each share to $29.12.
Last week, Gill (who goes by DeepF———Value on Reddit) revealed that he owned 120,000 in GameStop call options expiring June 21. He bought the call options at $5.68 per contract, or $68.1 million. The options had a strike price of $20 meaning, which is the price at which a put or call option can be exercised. When the stock price equals the strike, the option contract no longer has any intrinsic value.
With the deadline looming, and the stock falling for much of last week and early this week, Gill’s followers were eagerly waiting for the investor to exercise his options. Fans are speculating under Gill’s Reddit post that he may have used the money made from exercising his options to buy up the more than 4 million shares Gill added to his portfolio.
In the past month, Gill has taken GameStop shares on a wild ride. He kicked off a renewed meme stock frenzy in May when he broke his three-year social media hiatus, sending GameStop stock soaring. The hype quickly fizzled out as the company’s shares plunged once again. And last Friday, GameStop shares fell 40% following Gill’s first YouTube livestream in almost three years, seen by more than 600,000 viewers.
GameStop’s moves
GameStop stock soared 23% on Tuesday after the video game retailer revealed that it raised more than $2 billion from its previously announced sale of 75 million shares.
The company said it plans to use the net proceeds to for “general corporate purposes,” including acquisitions and investments.
Last Friday, GameStop also that its first-quarter net sales plunged 28% to $881.8 million, from $1.24 billion in the same period last year. It booked a net loss of $32.3 million for the quarter, narrower than its $50.5 million in losses a year ago.
