'Roaring Kitty' Is Sued For Alleged GameStop Manipulation (reuters.com) 123
Keith Gill, the investor known as "Roaring Kitty" online, is being used by GameStop investors for helping spur the meme stock mania of 2021. The plaintiffs said they lost money through his "pump-and-dump" scheme, which led to a "short squeeze" that caused losses for hedge funds betting stock prices would fall. Reuters reports: A proposed class action accusing Gill of securities fraud was filed on Friday in the Brooklyn, New York federal court. Investors led by Martin Radev, who lives in the Las Vegas area, said Gill manipulated GameStop securities between May 13 and June 13 by quietly accumulating large quantities of stock and call options, and then dumping some holdings after emerging from a three-year social media hiatus. They said Gill's activities caused GameStop's share price to gyrate wildly, generating "millions of dollars" in profit for him at their expense. "Defendant still enjoys celebrity status and commands a following of millions through his social media accounts," the complaint said. "Accordingly, Defendant was well aware of his ability to manipulate the market for GameStop securities, as well as the benefits he could reap."
He had on May 12 posted a cryptic meme on the social media platform X that was widely seen as a bullish signal for GameStop, whose stock he cheerleaded in 2021. GameStop's share price more than tripled over the next two days, but gave back nearly all the gains by May 24. On June 2, Gill revealed that he owned 5 million GameStop shares and 120,000 call options, and on June 13 revealed he had shed the call options but owned 9 million GameStop shares. Investors said the truth about Gill's investing became known on June 3 when the Wall Street Journal wrote about the timing of his options trades and said the online brokerage E*Trade considered kicking him off its platform.
He had on May 12 posted a cryptic meme on the social media platform X that was widely seen as a bullish signal for GameStop, whose stock he cheerleaded in 2021. GameStop's share price more than tripled over the next two days, but gave back nearly all the gains by May 24. On June 2, Gill revealed that he owned 5 million GameStop shares and 120,000 call options, and on June 13 revealed he had shed the call options but owned 9 million GameStop shares. Investors said the truth about Gill's investing became known on June 3 when the Wall Street Journal wrote about the timing of his options trades and said the online brokerage E*Trade considered kicking him off its platform.
Out of date? (Score:5, Informative)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
Isn't "short selling" a "deflate-and-dump"-scheme? (Score:3)
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If you short sell even more stocks in total than there are on the market - which happened to GameStop - then I'd say you act at least as manipulative as any "pump and dump scheme", just in the opposite direction. Short sellers clearly want to scare others into selling their (real) stock in fear of falling prices, just as much as "pump and dump"-scammers want to hype gullible investors into a buying frenzy.
I don't think the objective here is to be compensated for some wrong done to these 'investors'. The objective here is revenge. They want to tie him up in court, chew up his profits from the GameStop thing and generally just ruin him financially for making them, the princes of the universe, the winners of the great meritocracy, the alpha wolves of Wall Street look like a bunch of morons. Any damages they are awarded are gravy, but it's not what they are after. It's a case of: "... we do this stuff to you, YO
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Exactly, this!
There is a entire system of financial media and 'Wall Street Press' that lets hedge fund operators, and CEOs go and hype any damn thing they want, and make any widely speculative 'visions' they like; but a guy on youtube does it, and for that he has to hang!
Securities laws are extremely complex (read so big Wall Street firms can game them effectively) but hopefully this come down to. Kitty never had insider information, he never claimed he did, he looked at a bunch of public information about
Re: Isn't "short selling" a "deflate-and-dump"-sch (Score:2)
We should treat purchasing equity more like any other asset and just make people pay a federal equity sales tax up front. I don't think it will hurt investment. Why are you investing anyway if you don't believe it will grow enough to cover a few points in tax?
Because stocks always go up, never down, so who would mind paying a tax for the privilege of investing in a company.
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TFS was written by someone who doesn't seem to realise that TFA is not about the short squeeze. The short squeeze happened a few years ago. The pump and dump which is what is being sued over happened only a few months ago.
Whoever wrote the summary mashed together a sentence from the start of TFA and from the end of it not realising they were talking about two different things.
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Short selling a stock assumes you will have shares to buy. Shorting a stock that is already shorted to the hilt or beyond is not something your would do unless you were a moron, or were planning on manipulating the stock with others in order to ensure you made money.
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It is when the majority of the short close outs are scheduled within 2 months of each other, as was the case with the GSE shorts, it's pretty clear signs of market manipulation.
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At no point did I say short selling should be stopped, however it is telling that the people manipulating the market got their friends in the relevant brokerage firms to intervene on their behalf so they could stop losing so much money by stopping the small players from buying.
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It may be currently "valid" and "legal", but it should not be. The stock market is garbage to begin with and completely unnecessary. If we are going to keep it, shorting should be made illegal - especially when it was a concerted, coordinated effort to take the stock to zero (which is what the hedge funds were planning).
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Short selling was seen as harmful from the very beginnings of stock trading in 17th century Dutch Republic. Time to bring back "making an appeal to Frederick".
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Exactly. Either eliminate the short selling and anything related or eliminate the entire stock market. Society, and even business, has no need for it to begin with.
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Used? (Score:5, Informative)
Keith Gill, the investor known as "Roaring Kitty" online, is being used by GameStop investors for helping spur the meme stock mania of 2021.
I think you meant "sued".
Re:Used? (Score:4, Funny)
Short squeeze (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's any kind of investor that deserves to be "squeezed," it's short-sellers.
Owning stocks ought to be about investing in business, not betting they will crash.
I know, there's nothing illegal or even unethical about it. But it just goes against what it means to own a business.
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If there's any kind of investor that deserves to be "squeezed," it's short-sellers.
Owning stocks ought to be about investing in business, not betting they will crash.
I know, there's nothing illegal or even unethical about it. But it just goes against what it means to own a business.
So it's okay to bet the company will do well, but not okay to bet the company will crash? Should we only allow gamblers to bet on the team most likely to win?
Hans Kristian Graebener = StoneToss
Re:Short squeeze (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly the point. Owning a part of a company shouldn't be seen as a form of "betting." It should be...investing, about working towards success.
So no, I have no warm feelings for people who invest in a company for the explicit purpose of hoping it will crash.
Same principle applies to playing sports. If you are playing the game, you should be in it to win. Players aren't allowed to bet, because it creates a conflict of interest that isn't in the best interest of the team.
Short sellers can actually influence "the game" (the business) enough to make it fail, when it wouldn't otherwise fail.
I'm not idealistic, I know this idea isn't going anywhere. This is about feelings, not about reality.
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Yes, everything you said is true. But we all know what it's like to work for a company that is *only* interested in dollars and numbers. It's hell. Nobody would say it's a "good" way to run a business.
Nor is short-selling it a "good" way to invest in a company.
Yes, all investments come with some level of risk. But when the risk has nothing to do with the fundamentals of a business, and only to do with the relative ups and downs of the market, that is not a sound investment strategy. It's just gambling.
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Not to mention, it's much, much easier to short sell and manipulate the stock price down to force a profit - what they were doing to GameStop before reddit entered the game. You can't pull it off as easily with a company like Apple, nor can you as easily inflate the price of a stock. The stock market is a sucker's game and we'd be better off if it just poofed out of existence.
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Yes, short-selling does grease some palms, just like playing slits in Vegas greases some palms. But nothing of real value is generated with either form of gambling.
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I don't think that short-selling does actually reduce risk for long-term investors. Short-selling can negatively influence the long-term value of a stock.
Insurance is not just a gamble. It's actually risk pooling. You pay a relatively small amount, to cover the possibility of a large loss.
With short-selling, the bet is the other way around. You pay a relatively small amount, to put yourself on the hook for a potentially very large loss, if the stock goes the wrong way. In the GameStop example, if you borrow
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If you are a long-term investor in a stock and somebody wants to pay you money to borrow the stock and sell it which will lower the p
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If you are taking a long position, and your aim is to have an ownership stake in a good company, you are not going to lend your shares to a short-seller. As soon as you do that, you cease taking a long position, and begin participating in gambling on market fluctuations. The short seller is betting the stock price will go down, the short lender is betting the stock price will go up, each is merely gambling on the short-term direction of the stock price, not on the long-term direction of the stock price.
Yes,
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This is why short-sellers can really get clobbered. When you short a stock, your broker will require you to always have enough money in
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There is no such thing as zero risk, especially when brokers are lending non-existent shares to short-sellers.
Long-term ownership strategy means *foregoing* short-term gains, in the interest of long-term, manageable growth over time. Owners who lend their stock to short sellers, are playing games, not investing in a company they believe in.
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To short a company, you get someone to loan you the shares, say at $20 per share, then you immediate sell them (for $20 a share). Then you wait. The shorter is betting that the price will be lower by an agreed upon date. When the price goes down, the shorter buys the shares back (for, say, $15), then gives the shares back to the original owner. The shorter made $5 per share (m
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You don't seem to understand how long-term investment works. A long-term investor knows there will be ups and downs along the way, but believes in the long-term viability of the company. A short-seller believes that the company's stock will go down in the short term. It's possible for a company to both have a positive long-term outlook, and also a short term downward trend.
On a roller coaster, it's the ones who jump off, that get hurt.
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You assume the guy giving money to keep you from going homeless is doing so out of the kindness of his heart. Think of it more like getting a personal loan to stay above water; you are going to be paying that loan back later with interest, so the guy comes out ahead.
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People have also had slavery 2500 years ago, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] doesn't make it right.
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Re:Short squeeze (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrast with American slavery where blacks were considered sub humans. Worked like animals. Bred to create a new generation of slaves some of whom were sold to other plantations like they were cattle.
Ancient slavery was more akin to what most white immigrants to America went through - indentured servitude. Most white immigrants could not afford the passage so they entered into 7 years of indentured servitude in return for the cost of passage. They would work for 7 years for free on the masters farm and after 7 years would be set free with a set of tools by the master to go set up their own farm. Nowhere was there a feeling of racial superiority. it was a financial transaction. Very similar to how H1Bs agree to work 6 years for a company in the US today in order to get a green card.
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What you are saying is true, sure... however I wonder if you're trying to make the point that American slavery was "unique" in being race-based, which it certainly was not. Modern slavery is often one race, ethnicity or nationality forcing another to work for them, and there are countless examples going back thousands of years of your typical "your tribe is less worthy of being human than our tribe", including amongst African tribes. Just because one side is black and the other white - as opposed to one sid
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Illegal no but I think its highly unethical you are betting on someones failure. If I have a bet that you will die, or go bankrupt with someone else, is that morally Ok?
The result will be I will be rooting for your death/failure it makes me a questionable individual at best.
If you mean unethical in terms of the law then sure, but I don't think the law and ethical are the same thing.
You are not providing any real benefit to society? All you are is a sponge feeding of other peoples misery.
The fact that the la
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To play devil's advocate, there are businesses that are long past their prime, and _should_ go away.
Is it a conspiracy to keep rich people rich? Hardly. Rich people lose their shirts on short squeezes too.
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Business that are past their prime will go away on their own, they don't need people bet on them failing. If you think you can do better you know do something productive and start a business that can do better, or perhaps invest in a competing business if you can't be bothered doing that.
Sure rich people loose money on shorts, my problem here is when they did here is if a court case against the person, with no insider knowledge that made them loose money. Just a court case can bankrupt a person no need to w
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I agree with you on businesses past their prime.
Who is it exactly that these rich people will sue, if they lose money in a short squeeze? The business? They have money to defend themselves, I mean, they did just defeat market expectations. There's no "regular person" for the rich person to sue, when they lose their shirts on a short squeeze.
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Sorry I am not saying they are suing because of short selling, I am referring to the story:
Keith Gill, the investor known as "Roaring Kitty" online, is being used by GameStop investors
I am assuming used is a typo and it means sued
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Ah, got it.
Well I suspect that "Roaring Kitty" *deserves* to be sued. The "meme stock" thing didn't just "happen." These things are engineered. Sure, there's some luck involved, because many times, engineers fail to deliver. The point is, I have no doubt that "Roaring Kitty" set out to make a ton of money by getting a whole bunch of clueless individuals to invest in a nearly worthless stock. Assuming he was smart, he sold his stock before the bubble burst. All those individual investors are the ones who los
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I agree that Boeing is too big to fail. There are only two companies that make most of the world's large jetliners. It would not be good for anyone if that number went down to just one.
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Bombardier? Dassault? Embraer? Imagine what they could do with the order book that Boeing has. I can assure you that there are plenty of companies who could easily step into Boeing's shoes. Of course... perhaps they're not all American, and we got to protect the national interest even at the cost of a few thousand lives, right?
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These companies do not make large jetliners, only smaller commuter jets. There is a very big difference between building a 30-seat plane, and a 300-seat plane. No, they could not "easily" step into Boeing's shoes.
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To play devil's advocate, there are businesses that are long past their prime, and _should_ go away.
Is it a conspiracy to keep rich people rich? Hardly. Rich people lose their shirts on short squeezes too.
Playing devil's advocate myself, what about
- SCO under Darl McBride?
- Truth Social?
I considered short selling SCO back in the day, but decided it was a good way to lose a lot of money. It was obvious that the company was going to go belly-up in the medium term, but court rulings or investments by Microsoft could - and did - play havoc in the short term. The stake through the heart of SCO came when IBM managed to convince a court - probably correctly - that SCO did not own the patents they were trying to e
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Yep, SCO and Truth Social are good examples of companies that "should" go away. But short-selling as a strategy is nothing more than a form of gambling, and for that reason I don't support it. Investment should be about ownership, not about gambling.
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What it means to "own a business" is to make as much money as you legally can.
There is more than one way to make money by owning a business.
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That is not false, but it is a very crass way of looking at it.
Owning a business is *really* about providing valuable products and services that meet the needs of your customers. Making money is a secondary (important) objective.
Those who are in it *ONLY* to make as much money as they legally can (you know, like PE "pump and dump" investors)...can go to hell. Nobody wants to be a customer or employee of such a business, except maybe other PE "pump and dump" investors.
Hmmm...that phrase, "pump and dump" seem
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Not its not, that's what it means to be a psychopath and own a business. There are plenty of businesses, that care about both their customers, communities and employees.
The problem is when you get to a publicly traded business you are so far removed from the actual share holders want that its kind of immoral actually do the moral thing.
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I've always been conflicted about this.
By investing in a company, you're increasing the price and face value of future investments. Whether or not you want to, you're advertising for that stock.
By taking no action (not buying or selling), you have no effect on the price/value of the stock and aren't advertising for that stock.
What happens if you believe that a stock is severely over-valued such as via fraud or at least intentionally capitalizing on ignorant investors? How do you "anti-invest"? You short the
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You seem to have a few things turned around.
First, when you short-sell a stock, you don't buy it. Instead, you _borrow_ it from a broker and then _sell_ it on the open market. If the stock price goes down, you can buy back the stock at the new, lower price, and return it to the broker. If you sold it on the open market for $10, and you buy it back for $2, you get to keep the $8 difference.
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
So, when you short-sell, you are certainly not "advertising" for the stock. In fact, yo
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>Owning stocks ought to be about investing in business, not betting they will crash.
Agreed. Stocks are supposed to be a way of pooling capital to allow groups to share risk and launch larger ventures than any individual reasonably could.
Shorting is a way of converting (perverting it, really) stocks into pure gambling.
The entire system could be vastly improved with a daily blind auction system. Everybody submits their bids for the day, highest bids take offered shares at close of business. Maybe have a
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I have often thought the stock market would be a better place if investors were required to hold a stock for a minimum period of time, such as a year. Investors then would be much more interested in the longer-term performance of the company, rather than the quarterly (or shorter) drumbeat we currently see.
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I'll settle for 24 hours, which would kill off HFT.
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That would certainly be a start!
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If there's any kind of investor that deserves to be "squeezed," it's short-sellers.
Owning stocks ought to be about investing in business, not betting they will crash.
I know, there's nothing illegal or even unethical about it. But it just goes against what it means to own a business.
The primary purpose of short selling is insurance. That's an important part of running a business. There's nothing to prevent someone from engaging in short selling for speculation, but there is a legitimate purpose for short selling.
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Yep, I get it. With that said, there are better ways of getting insurance. You know, like getting an...insurance policy.
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Possibly. But why limit the righteous rage to just the short seller. I would say the majority of day traders are screwing up the market far more than sellers, buying and selling with mere hours, minutes, or seconds of each other is perverting the intent of investing in a business - meaning all those guys where you work who buy and sell on their lunch break are just as guilty of messing it all up, and yet Reddit vigilantes left them alone (likely because all those vigilantes were also day traders).
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I completely agree on day traders. They aren't investing, they're just gambling.
Short sellers are very important (Score:2)
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The "good" things you attribute to shorting, can be accomplished in other ways. Shorting isn't such a unique tool that it is irreplaceable.
Some use it as an insurance policy, for example. But one could instead buy...an insurance policy.
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Shorting a stock is a signal that you think the stock is significantly overvalued. In and of itself a perfectly valid thing to do. The issue with the Gamestop shorts is that there was more shorted stock than stock in existence. That means that without some sort of guarantee to moderate the close outs of those shorts, and with the vast majority of them all set to expire within a period of IIRC 2 months of one another that was effectively impossible, you had a very large chance of losing more than you could a
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The brokers in this case--lending out more shares than were in existence--were guilty of fraud, IMO. This is much worse than the normal practice of short-selling.
I'd still argue that short-selling is unsavory. It's kind of like banks charging overdraft fees, sorting overdrafts from smallest to largest, to maximize the number of fees collected. It's legal, but not ethical, nor is it really a practice that serves the purpose of overdraft fees, but rather, to gouge poor people. Short-selling has nothing to do
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But it just goes against what it means to own a business.
It doesn't go against ownership. In fact it has nothing to do with it. If you want to short sell, you're not betting against the business, you're betting against someone who owns a business. i.e. you need someone to own shares in order to short sell by betting against that owner.
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you're not betting against the business, you're betting against someone who owns a business
This is a distinction, without a difference.
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Oh, no. Hard disagree. A short is unethical, if it's being used to manipulate the market against the real value of the company.
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OK, so your disagreement is that in some cases, a short *is* unethical? I don't dispute that. What I said was, a short isn't, in itself, unethical.
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"Owning stocks ought to be about investing in business"
The business only receives an investment when the share is offered. When you buy a long position on the market, you are not making any new investment in the business.
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While your statement is true, there are ways that a company makes money through higher stock prices, some tangible, others intangible. For example, the goodwill brought about by higher stock prices, increases the confidence other businesses have in doing business with the company. On the more tangible side, companies very often own some of their own stock, or choose to dilute their existing shares in a new IPO. If the stock price is high, the proceeds from the sale of new shares is higher, and the other sha
oh no, the poor defensless hedge funds (Score:2)
gamblers lose money to another gambler that played the game better.
the only negative about this story is that we mix investing in companies with stock market gambling schemes and that such short term activity has real impact on the things being gambled on.
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The hedge funds will sue Roaring Kitty for doing what they do because they can and the courts will support it.
Aka front running (Score:2)
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Given that the post you are replying to is describing something else (pump n'dump), probably not.
A website I use shows the best performing and worst performing three stocks on each of: Dow Jones, Nasdaq 100, Nasdaq Composite. The best three on the Nasdaq Composite all increased by over 33% yesterday, the worst three all dropped by over 50%. Those movements were actually relatively small, increases of 100% or 200% are not unusual, drops by 90% are also fairly frequent. Anyone who puts money onto shares li
Typo in summary (Score:2)
I guess confusion between "used" and "sued" gets by the spell checker...
not an employee (Score:4, Insightful)
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All it requires is lying about a stock with the intent of defrauding people of their money.
Being the lawsuit was promptly dropped by the filer- I'm guessing you're right, and this dude's actions were probably above board.
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They realized that pursuing the suit would open them up to the discovery process.
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Wrongdoing by the GS shortsellers was exactly what made the GS stocks go up, and keep going up. It was so massively overleveraged with shorts, that the Shortsellers had to buy when the prices were higher than anticipated, which is why they lost money.
Collusive short selling to destroy companies is a well known and documented 'secret' of the industry.
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There is nothing wrong with shorting a stock.
Any fool could see that shorting GS was a wise move. They've been on the verge of death for ages.
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Guess they really were a fool!
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Not exactly.
GS had just done a large restructuring to focus on where the market was going. They were doing better. The shorts were not rational. It was a matter of the response driving the stimulus, not vice versa as it should be.
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GS had just done a large restructuring to focus on where the market was going.
Not relevant.
They were doing better.
Doing better does not mean the ship is going to turn around. It means it's sinking slower.
The shorts were not rational.
Yes, they were.
It was a matter of the response driving the stimulus, not vice versa as it should be.
Bullshit.
Gamestop's business is going the way of the buggy whip.
They're on year 6 of every single quarter with a negative operating income.
Their stock offering in 2021 saved them from bankruptcy- but they've burned through every penny of it now, and they're back on the downward spiral.
So forgive me, but fucking bullshit.
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He's not an employee of GS, he doesn't have insider information on GS, so how exactly would he be liable for anything?
He's not being sued for insider trading. You can influence a market without being part of the business, and it is none the less illegal.
Every hedge fund (Score:3)
By that rule, every hedge fund is operating a "pump-and-dump" scheme. These people got played by a few million competitors who decided to use the rules against the rich oligarchy. As much as Americans love to blame a single person/gang, I'm not sure it's possible in this case.
So hedge fund dicks can do it but no one else can? (Score:2)
When to step back... (Score:2)
Suit already dropped. (Score:4, Informative)
https://old.reddit.com/r/Super... [reddit.com]
The Plaintiff apparently only owned 25 shares, probably bought merely to establish "standing" in order to file the suit. News outlets already got what they wanted, a nice juicy headline to promote.
I'm curious to see how many headlines about the * dropping * of the suit make the front pages... I'm betting none.
Since when is the stock market guaranteed? (Score:2)
>> "...that caused losses for hedge funds betting stock prices would fall."
Exactly. Betting. Since when is the stock market guaranteed?
You are abusing (Score:2)