NEW YORK (news agencies) — A pivotal actor in the meme stock craze that began during the pandemic continues to hold a powerful sway over the movement of shares in major U.S. corporations.
Nearly four months after revealing a massive stake in the online pet supply retailer Chewy, Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, has dissolved his entire holdings in the company.
Shares slumped overnight and traded down 1% on Wednesday.
Filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in July revealed that Gill had acquired 6.6% of the company’s shares after hinting at investments using pictures of dogs on the social media platform X.
Gill became widely known 2021, when he rallied retail investors around GameStop. At the time, the video game retailer was struggling to survive — and big Wall Street hedge funds and major investors were betting against it, or shorting its stock. But Gill and those who agreed with him changed GameStop’s trajectory by buying thousands of shares in the face of almost all accepted metrics that told investors that the company was in serious trouble.
GameStop and Chewy have a common tie in Ryan Cohen. He founded Chewy in 2011 and stepped down as CEO in 2018. Gill saw in Cohen the potential to save GameStop, where he is CEO.
Other meme stocks have arisen since then, one of the most well known being Trump Media & Technology Group Corp.
Trump Media this week surpassed the market value of Elon Musk’s social media platform X, both because the value of that company under Musk has collapsed, and because of extremely volatile trading in Trump Media, which uses the ticker symbol “DJT.”
Meme stocks were a novelty during the pandemic but have become a reality today, like it or not, rising and falling on little else other than momentum and the enthusiasm of investors. Shares of Trump Media have more than doubled in 2024, though the company’s losses rise exponentially every year and its debt continues to soar.
In a filing late Tuesday with U.S. regulators, Gill revealed that he had liquidated his entire stake in Chewy, more than 9 million shares at one point, which had made him the company’s third-largest stakeholder.
