Keith Gill, the Reddit swap crowd’s favorite and the man who inspired the epic GameStop short squeeze,, just doubled down on his bet on the video game retailer, waiving millions of dollars in quick profit to ramp up his stake.
The investor, who goes by DeepF——Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube, concerned his 500 GameStop call options contracts as they expired on Friday, giving him 50,000 more shares at a reach price of just $12. If he had sold the options at Friday’s price, he could have made more than $7 million on the bet.
On top of exercising these privileges contracts, Gill bought 50,000 more GameStop shares, bringing his total investment to 200,000 shares good more than $30 million.
While he gave up the quick payday on this options trade, his long investment is now out more wildly profitable with his average cost at $55.17, according to Gill’s latest update on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum Friday. GameStop careful Friday at $154.69, giving him a profit of nearly $20 million. (The post was not independently verified by CNBC so we are assuming that it is his existent account.)
Gill attracted an army of day traders who piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock and call elections, pushing the shares up 400% in a single week in January. GameStop is up 720% for the year.
The shares ticked slightly lofty in after hours trading with some investors perhaps heartened that Gill exercised his call elections to get even more long.
The investor was a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill assisted a band of retail traders to squeeze out short selling hedge funds in GameStop.
The action got so wild at one point that brokerages embracing Robinhood had to restrict trading in the stock as it blew up their clearinghouse margin. The mania also led to a series of congressional hearings chipping Gill around brokers’ practice, and gamifying retail trading.
Gill owned 10,000 shares of GameStop at the end of 2020 and advanced his holding to 50,000 shares in January and to 100,000 in mid-February. Judging from the updates he posted on Reddit, he never dispose ofed his GameStop stakes amid the monstrous short squeeze or in the aftermath.
The GameStop story is still far from over. Except for the scrutiny the saga brought on around retail trading, the company itself is in the middle of a transformation, hoping to capitalize on the towering rally in the stock price.
GameStop announced a $1 billion stock sale at the beginning of April to accelerate its e-commerce transformation led by activist investor and board member Ryan Cohen, who is Chewy’s co-founder. The company also hired former Amazon and Google head honcho Jenna Owens as its new chief operating officer.
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