(Bloomberg) — Keith Gill — the meme stock investor known online as “Roaring Kitty” — claims to have abandoned his entire options position in GameStop Corp. while increasing his stock pile.
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A screenshot on Gill’s Reddit account on Thursday showed that his portfolio no longer included the 120,000 GameStop call options that were set to expire next week and had a strike price of $20. Instead, his portfolio had a position of more than nine million common shares, up from five million earlier this week.
The screenshot, under Gill’s Reddit handle “DeepF—-ing Value,” appears to show a cash position that has fallen to $6.3 million, from nearly $30 million on Monday. This implies that Gill may have used some of the cash to increase his common stock stake.
Calls were exchanged approximately 142,000 times on Wednesday and Thursday. At the end of Wednesday’s session, the number of active contracts had already fallen by 34% to 111,818.
The $20 calls, which closed at $6.40 on Wednesday, traded between $6 and $9.80 on Thursday as GameStop shares rose 14% to $29.12. This leaves the options above Gill’s purported average purchase price of $5.6754.
“It looks like he wrote 80,000 call options and exercised 40,000,” said Danny Kirsch, head of options at Piper Sandler & Co. “So now he owns nine million shares, according to the screenshots circulating on Reddit.”
The increase in trading came as GameStop was scheduled to hold a shareholder meeting on Thursday. However, the meeting was postponed due to technical difficulties with live streaming, according to the company.
News of Gill’s post and his highly anticipated return to YouTube last week nearly doubled GameStop’s stock price to more than $45. The company took advantage of the rally by selling $2.14 billion worth of stock to raise cash. As the options’ expiration approached, Wall Street wondered whether Gill would exercise the contracts to receive the shares or simply close the position.
Gill’s cryptic
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