The Reddit trader who claimed to have made tens of millions of dollars led an army of amateur investors to get hold of GameStop shares – a campaign set up as a pits between Main Street and Wall Street – lost $ 13 million Tuesday as shares of wrestlers. video game salesman withdrew.
Keith Gill, who goes by the name “DeepF *** ingValue” on Reddit and “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube, revealed in a post on the WallStreetBets discussion board that the value of his GameStop holdings had fallen to $ 7.6 million. That was down nearly $ 21 million the previous day and a staggering $ 50 million from last week when GameStop’s stock peaked at $ 483 each.
On Tuesday, Gill tweeted an image of a kitten with a shocked look that raised one paw to his face.
Gill still seems to be firmly in the black about his GameStop investment. The brokerage statement that the former MassMutual financial adviser posted on Reddit Tuesday night showed a cash balance of nearly $ 13 million. He first made public that he was buying GameStop shares in mid-2019. At the time, the stock was trading for just over $ 4 a share, while options to buy the stock cost around $ 50,000.
It is unlikely that many average investors who stepped into GameStop’s stock and cheered each other on on the WallStreetBets Reddit forum made such outrageous profits. GameStop shares rose slightly to just over $ 93 from noon on Wednesday. But the retailer’s stock price has fallen for the past week, losing more than 80% of its value, and clearing nearly $ 30 billion from GameStop investors’ accounts.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with other top regulators later this week to discuss GameStop’s volatile trading, as well as the stocks of other so-called “meme stock” companies and even the price of silver, all seemingly enmeshed in the recent trading frenzy sparked by social media.
Shares of movie theater chain AMC Entertainment also rebounded slightly on Wednesday, to nearly $ 8.50, after falling 40% on Tuesday. Shares of the former mobile device maker BlackBerry, another stock widely cited in WallStreetBets, rose just 14 cents to just under $ 12 on Wednesday. That company’s stock was as high as $ 28 last week.
The stock’s price movements come amid growing evidence that some hedge funds have played both sides of the GameStop drama. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Mudrick Capital, a $ 3 billion hedge fund, had made nearly $ 200 million betting AMC and GameStop’s shares to soar last month. It has previously been reported that a number of hedge funds shorted or bet on GameStop and other stocks, contributing to the spikes in those companies’ stocks.
There are also concerns that the discussion on WallStreetBets is being disrupted by bots. CBS MoneyWatch reported Monday that the discussion board moderators had recently detected a “large amount” of bot activity in the stock recommendation content posted to the group.