[CNBCで英語学習！]個人トレーダー初の億万長者物語[6分動画]

Roaring Kitty Keith Gill.. Targets Keith Gill... But then they waited for their hero, Mr. Roaring Kitty.

Roaring Kitty became a household name on Wall Street in 2021. He was the poster child of the meme stock craze. (What up everybody ~Roaring Kitty here)

And he became so big then Netflix had a movie made on him in 2023 ~ (Gamestop) ~ based on his initial $50,000 bet on GameStop he made five years ago.

(Language, the baby’s here)

In 2024, he made an even bigger bet, and now has a slim ~ a very slim chance ~ to become the first retail trader billionaire. Here’s how it all went down.

Yeah, the meme trade may very well be back. Roaring Kitty. Remember that name of WallStreetBets’ fame he’s returned.

So Roaring Kitty, whose real name is Keith Gill. In early May, he posted a picture on X of a man leaning forward from his chair. And that was enough to spark a huge rally in Gamestop shares.

Trading activity for GME has been only 10 minutes, the rest of the day has been halted. And even with just 10 minutes of trading the stock to three and a half times the normal volume.

Week later, he showed us a screenshot of his E trade portfolio holding a massive amount of GameStop shares and also options. This is a significantly larger position than three years ago during the Gamestop mania. Three years ago, at the end of the mania, he had 200,000 Gamestop shares, and now we’re talking about 5 million shares. So it’s 25 times larger the position. Also what’s significant is that he held 120,000 call options against GameStop. A call option gives the buyer the right not the obligation to buy the underlying shares at a certain price within a certain timeframe. So in Keith Gill’s case, he had a strike price of $20, and expiration date on June 21, which means if Gamestop shares go above $20 a piece, that will make his Calls in the money. So on June 21, he could exercise all of the Calls by buying back the underlying 12 million shares. But that would have cost him a total of $240 million. So a lot of people had speculated that he didn’t have enough money to pull up such a move.

120,000 calls, that’s not very easy to get out of all at once. So it would probably have to trade in smaller pieces. But once the smaller piece trades, you know, everyone starts to say, oh, you know, you know, it’s time to get out of this thing. And it because it’s such a following and such an army, it is going to be somewhat difficult to get out if he’s just going to try to get out through the options.

While we’re coming back with breaking news, because the live stream has finally started. Roaring Kitty hosted his first live stream on YouTube in over three years. And that attracted a lot of attention. On the day of the live stream, the stock was halted multiple times, and it actually plunged 40% on the day of the live stream. It was partly because the fact that he mentioned he wasn’t working with anybody else. And that confirmed a lot of people’s theory that he didn’t have the money to exercise all of the calls.

On Friday, at least because we know how the story changes day to day with the stock. The fun did not win over the fundamentals, given the business is still in that very drastic turnaround strategy.

So a few days later, Roaring Kitty showed another screenshot of his portfolio, and he had an additional $4 million shares of GameStop and no call options left. That means that he either dumped all of it, or he sold part of it and exercised part of it. And it’s hard to decipher what he did exactly to get to the additional 4 million shares in GameStop. Roaring Kitty really created this herd like mentality among retail investors by posting just memes and very cryptic messages online. The underlying message is he hopes that other people will follow suit in holding on to their position in GameStop. The retail investor landscape is a little bit different this time. In 2021, a lot of people were in lockdown. They had stimulus money to spend. A lot of them were first time traders in the stock market. And this time I think retail investors are savvier and they know what’s going on.

I think for the retail trader they’re a little bit smarter this time around or a little bit more prepared. I think the first go around with Gamestop it was a new thing. That squeeze that pump was with everybody was there everybody was on it. We saw dilution not just from the stock but from people either losing money or moving on to other stocks or moving different groups.

And I think people got burned. Some people, you know, held look for exiting this time look for a reason to sell and weren’t like this is going to a million. So I think you have a smarter, more resilient and more prepared retail trader this time around.

All of his money is concentrated in this one company that’s not going well. It’s very risky. It’s a lot closer to gambling than it is to trading. And it’s certainly not investing. And, you know, is a tweet really investment advice?

Fundamentally, this company is struggling. The stock has become a meme stock and it’s a speculative play. So we’ll see how the stock will trade in the next few months. But there’s a disconnect between fundamentals and the stock price in GameStop.