Keith Gill, the favorite of the Reddit trading people and the man who inspired the epic GameStop Short Squeeze, just doubled his bet on the video game dealer and foregoing a quick million dollar win to increase his stake.
The investor, who offers DeepF —— Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube, exercised his 500 GameStop call option contracts as they expired on Friday, giving him 50,000 more shares at an exercise price of only 12 USD. If he had sold the options at Friday’s price, he could have made more than $ 7 million on the bet.
In addition to exercising these options contracts, Gill bought 50,000 more GameStop shares and increased his total investment to 200,000 shares valued at more than $ 30 million.
While he’s been giving up the quick payday on this options trading, his long investment is now even wilder profitable at its average cost of $ 55.17, according to Gill’s latest update on the Reddit r / WallStreetBets forum on Friday. GameStop closed at $ 154.69 on Friday, bringing it to a profit of nearly $ 20 million. (The post hasn’t been independently verified by CNBC so we’ll assume it’s his actual account.)
Gill attracted an army of day traders who piled into the stationary video game and call options, propelling stocks up 400% in a single week in January. GameStop is up 720% over the year.
Shares rose slightly after close of business with some investors, perhaps encouraging Gill to exercise his call options to get even longer.
The investor was a former Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance marketer. Through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill encouraged a group of retailers to drive out hedge fund short selling on GameStop.
The action got so wild at one point that brokers, including Robinhood, had to restrict trading in stocks as it blew up their clearinghouse margin. The mania also led to a series of Congressional hearings where Gill discussed broker practices and retail gamifying.
Gill owned 10,000 shares of GameStop at the end of 2020 and increased his stake to 50,000 shares in January and 100,000 shares in mid-February. Judging by the updates he posted on Reddit, he has not sold his GameStop stakes in the incredibly short period of time or in the period that followed.
The GameStop story is far from over. In addition to reviewing the retail saga, the company is itself in the midst of a transformation and hopes to capitalize on the massive price rally.
GameStop announced a $ 1 billion stock sale in early April to accelerate the transition to e-commerce led by activist investor and board member Ryan Cohen, co-founder of Chewy. The company also hired former Amazon and Google CEO Jenna Owens as its new chief operating officer.
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