Investing

Roaring Kitty’s $262 Million Stirs Skeptics in Meme Stock Era

  • Retail trader Keith Gill has a paper fortune in GameStop mania
  • Short sellers have wised up, but manipulation questions swirl

Keith Gill during a YouTube livestream arranged on a laptop at the New York Stock Exchange on June 7.

Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
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As a renewed bout of GameStop Corp. fever gripped the meme-stock faithful, fans of trading influencer Keith Gill waited for one moment: The day their hero, aka “Roaring Kitty,” aka “Deep F—-ing Value,” would become a billionaire.

The notion was hardly far-fetched. Over the course of two weeks, Gill had been posting images of a massive stake in GameStop and its call options in a portfolio that peaked at more than $550 million on June 6. Though he’s added even more stock since then, the dollar value of his holdings has dropped along with the company’s shares.