GameStop Stock Falls 9% as Roaring Kitty Turns His Attention to Chewy

GameStop (GME) fell off another 9% after the weekend, signaling that the stock is suffering from a lack of attention now that influencer Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, has turned his attention to other meme assets. 

After closing at $24.81 during after-hours trading on Friday, GME fell off a sharp 9.47% on Monday morning, to as low as $22.46. It has since recovered slightly, to $23.39 at writing. 

The drop-off comes as Gill, GME’s most prominent advocate, has resurfaced online recently to say nothing of GameStop, but instead plug a new meme stock: Chewy (CHWY), an online pet food retailer. 

On Thursday, Gill posted an enigmatic image of a cartoon dog that many took to resemble Chewy’s logo. Within 15 minutes, CHWY soared over 33%. Traders speculated that Gill might have picked Chewy because the pet company’s founder and former CEO, Ryan Cohen, is the current CEO and largest shareholder of GameStop.

The tweeted reference appears to have not been a fluke. A form filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday indicated that Gill purchased over 9 million CHWY shares last week, a position that would give him a 6.6% ownership stake in the company. 

Spoof filings deployed to pump stocks’ values are a thing on Wall Street, however—and Gill hasn’t yet made any public statements about his Chewy stake. CHWY has fallen off about 13% since hitting its peak last week, to $26.07 at writing. 

One thing that’s not up for debate about Gill’s pivot to Chewy, however, is that it has taken some wind out of GameStop’s sails. When Gill resurfaced online after years of silence and began enthusiastically referencing GME, the stock went crazy, more than quadrupling in value. It’s since fallen off nearly 64% since those highs of mid-May. 

Crucially, though, GameStop still remains far above prices from before Roaring Kitty’s latest act. Just a month before Gill’s surprise return to Twitter on May 12, GME was hovering around $10. Today it’s worth more than twice that. 

On Monday, a class of disgruntled investors filed a federal lawsuit against Gill, accusing him of violating securities laws and manipulating GME’s price for his own benefit.

Edited by Andrew Hayward