‘Roaring Kitty’ forgoes quick GameStop options payday in the millions, raises stake

It could be a big pay day for Keith Gill, the Reddit trading crowd’s favorite and the man who inspired the epic GameStop short squeeze.

Friday is the expiration date of Gill’s 500 call options contracts he bought at the beginning of 2021. Gill — who goes by DeepF——Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube — attracted an army of day traders who piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock and call options, pushing the stock up 400% in a single week in January.

GameStop closed at $156.44 a share on Thursday, up 730% for the year. Assuming Gill still holds the contracts and sells them Friday, at a $12 strike price, he will make more than $7 million on his position (The options cost the buyer $10,000 in total).

It’s unclear if Gill has already closed his position at a profit. His last update on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum was on April 1, which showed 500 outstanding call options in a position worth more than $8 million at the time. (The post was not independently verified by CNBC so we are assuming that it is his actual account.)

Gill has also been holding 100,000 shares of GameStop, which he bought at around $27 a share, according to the screenshots he posts on Reddit. As of April 1, the stake gained more than $16 million. It wasn’t clear if he sold the shares this month.

The investor was a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill encouraged a band of retail traders to squeeze out short-selling hedge funds in GameStop.

The trading got so wild at one point that brokerages including 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 featuring Gill around brokers’ practice, and gamifying retail trading.

Gill owned 10,000 shares of GameStop at the end of 2020 and increased 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 sold his GameStop stakes amid the monstrous short squeeze or in the aftermath.

The GameStop story is still far from over. Beside the scrutiny the saga brought on around retail trading, the company itself is in the middle of a transformation, hoping to capitalize on the massive rally in stock price.

GameStop announced a $1 billion stock sale at the beginning of April to accelerate its e-commerce transition led by activist investor and board member Ryan Cohen, who was Chewy’s co-founder. The company also hired former Amazon and Google executive Jenna Owens as its new chief operating officer.