He’s not exactly Bill Ackman, who netted $8.5 billion yesterday after selling a stake in his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, but after two years of failure, Keith Gill AKA Roaring Kitty isn’t doing too bad either.
Drink your morning coffee ☕ in the inbox. Apply here.
Estimates show he has already made a $6.8 million profit on paper on his $65.7 million GameStop call options, which have risen 87% in value over the past month and briefly jumped 70% yesterday from Monday. Bloomberg says he’s sitting on paper with a $170 million gain, but would need to spend $240 million on the exercise of options to achieve it all.
Gill became a meme stonk sensation in 2021, when he went by the name Roaring Kitty on YouTube and DeepF—ingValue on Reddit and talked about the value of Gamestop stock, which he repeatedly genuinely liked. The CFA Institute, however, knew him only as Keith Gill and expelled him when it became apparent that he was also a Charterholder with a job at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., and had failed to report his Kitty activity to FINRA. Gill later went silent after appearing at a hearing in the US House of Representatives and stating that he was not a cat.
Now he’s back, and the fans are here for it. «This man is a savage,» says one called caffeineandketamine on the Reddit thread where Gill announced his new Gamestop position. «Get the nipple cream ready monkey,» says another.
However, not everyone is so sure about the new Gill. The Wall Street Journal reports that E*Trade is considering banning him from its platform. He’s worried about stock price manipulation, but it probably doesn’t help that E*Trade’s systems crashed in May when Gill first resurfaced and sparked a flurry of stock meme activity. Hank Medina, the man behind the Litquidity Instagram account, wondered about the new Gill. «Keith is now just posting random pics to prime the pump,» he said on Twitter yesterday. «Wrongly, it appears that he is essentially leading every GameStop pump by buying more shares/calls and then continuing to tweet, knowing full well that the retailers will raise the price to an insane amount.»
Morgan Stanley, which owns E*Trade, is said to have its global financial crime unit and outside advisers debating whether Gill’s actions were legal. However, the bank is also wary of banning him from the platform and incurring the wrath of his meme army. «It’s gonna be one hell of a ride boy,» says one.
In addition, Financial News suggests that jobs in France, Germany and Milan may not be as secure as previously thought. Goldman Sachs reduced them by 5% last year, while JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley added 544 and 100 people, respectively.
In the meantime…
Forget Jain Global, Diego Megia launched Taula Capital Management with $5 billion on day one. It employs 68 people across London, Jersey, New York, Dubai, Milan and Switzerland. (Bloomberg)
Panmure Liberum is eliminating more than two dozen roles following the merger. (Bloomberg)
“The landscape of structured equity products has changed a lot. Before, it was more pushed out of Europe and Asia. Now much of that activity has changed and America is leading the way. Margins in the business are also shrinking as more banks invest in this space and automation increases. The volume of issuance is high, but we are not seeing the same increase in bank income.» (IFR)
If you are contacting someone between the ages of 18 and 34, it helps to send an SMS before calling. (WSJ)
If your salary were to double from $50,000 to $100,000, it would typically need to double again to $200,000 to create an equivalent increase in happiness. (WSJ)
Have a confidential story, tip or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill out our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Please be patient if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these people may be sleeping or away from their desks, so it may take some time for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or defamatory (in which case it won’t.)