① "Roaring Kittens" posted another mysterious picture on the social media platform X after two months. ② And the market effect it caused at least allowed an options trader (uncertain if it was Gill himself) to make substantial profits in a short period of time.
Caixin News reported on September 7th that Keith Gill, the American retail investor known as the "Roaring Kittens", who had gone silent for nearly two months, returned on Friday...
It is reported that "Roaring Kittens" once again posted a cryptic picture on the social media platform X after two months, which seems to have caused significant market effects and at least allowed an options trader (uncertain if it was Gill himself) to make substantial profits in a short period of time.
On the same day, "Roaring Kittens" posted a picture from the 1999 movie "Toy Story 2" - of course, this picture has been modified, with a dog's face photo-shopped onto the character Woody, who was being thrown down from the air by his young owner.
As this is the first post by the account named "Roaring Kittens" on the X platform in over two months, it quickly attracted the attention of American retail investors on social media and led to the close association of two stocks with "Roaring Kittens".$GameStop (GME.US)$and $Chewy (CHWY.US)$ Abnormal in intra-day trading.
In fact, people are not unfamiliar with the cartoon dog headshot that the "Roaring Kitty" placed in the latest P Chart, as the last tweet published by Gill two months ago was this cartoon dog's headshot. Following the release of that tweet, the stock price of Chewy, a US online pet food retailer, skyrocketed, and it was later confirmed that Gill held a 6.6% stake in the company.
Therefore, after seeing the latest post on Friday, many people speculated that Keith Gill might be selling Chewy, which led to a significant short-term decline in Chewy's stock.
However, in retrospect, it seems that Gill's real target is not Chewy, but the original "ancestor" of meme stocks, GameStop.
According to the website "Know Your Meme", the screenshot from "Toy Story 2" mentioned above carries the meaning of "I don't want to play with you anymore", and is often used to represent the public's abandonment of video games. Based on this, some individual investors in the United States speculated, "Has Gill returned to where he left off?"
In terms of market changes, after Gill's post, GameStop's stock price initially rose 9% during intraday trading on Friday. Although the stock price increase narrowed later in the day, the full-day increase was still over 6.8%, closing at $23.92.
It is reported that about 18 minutes before Gill's post at noon, a trader seems to have bought about 10,000 call options on GameStop expiring on September 13th, with an exercise price of $22.5, with a total value of approximately $1.74 million.
About 20 minutes after the tweet was posted, two groups of such options (each with 5,000 contracts) were sold, with a total value of approximately $2.29 million.
According to LSEG's statistics, there are only about 4,300 open positions in these call contracts before Friday. Therefore, the positions closed after the tweet on Friday are likely to be the positions opened before the tweet was posted. This mysterious trader made a net profit of about $0.55 million (approximately 3.89 million RMB) in just a few tens of minutes, achieving a return of about 30%.
Currently, it is not known whether this mysterious options trader is Gill himself.
It is worth mentioning that in July of this year, investors in GameStop filed a lawsuit against Keith Gill for his involvement in the 'pump and dump' scheme related to GameStop's stocks. However, this lawsuit was inexplicably withdrawn afterwards. And now, after a silence of nearly two months, it seems that Gill is starting to stir up trouble in the market again...
Editor/Emily