Keith Gill bought millions of shares of Chewy stock before his tweet caused the stock to jump
Keith Gill purchased the stock in the days and weeks before his June 27 tweet.
Last Thursday, my colleague Luke Kawa noted that the stock price of Chewy, an online pet food retailer, jumped 34% after Keith Gill, the GameStop uber-bull better known by his online moniker “Roaring Kitty,” tweeted a picture of an animated dog. It wasn’t immediately obvious why Chewy’s stock surged, but Luke highlighted that Ryan Cohen, GameStop’s current CEO, is also the cofounder and former CEO of Chewy, and on June 7, Gill explained in a livestream that his bullishness on GameStop was “a bet on the management, in particular, of course, Ryan fucking Cohen.”
It appears that Roaring Kitty’s admiration for Cohen has transcended GameStop, because on Monday morning, a Schedule 13G filing with the SEC showed that Keith Gill now owns about 9 million Chewy shares, representing a 6.6% stake in the company. The position was worth $245 million as of Friday’s closing price.
A couple of things to note on this:
First, Gill’s filing included a section in which he designated that he is “not a cat,” alluding to a comment he made in his 2021 testimony before Congress during the GameStop hearing.
Second, and more importantly, the “Date of Event Which Requires Filing of This Statement” was June 24th, or last Monday. Investors have to file a Schedule 13G or 13D when they acquire a 5% stake in a company, meaning that at least three days before tweeting the picture of the dog, Gill had already accumulated millions of shares in the company.
As Luke noted last week, Chewy’s stock was up 89% from May 12, when Keith Gill returned to social media, before his tweet last Thursday, and there had been a strong increase in short-dated Chewy call option purchases in the week prior.
It’s also worth noting that from April 1 through June 26, the average trading volume on Chewy’s stock was ~10.5 million shares, but on May 29, volume jumped to 66.6 million, and on June 18, 24, 25, and 26, volume was above 20 million shares traded. In fact, eight of Chewy’s 10 highest volume days of the year were between May 29 and July 1, per Yahoo Finance. Between the stock’s performance and the volume uptick since May, it appears that a lot of money, including Gill’s, was flowing into Chewy in the weeks leading up to his tweet.
While Chewy’s price spiked 34% immediately after Gill’s tweet on June 27, the gains were short-lived, and Chewy is now trading below its June 24 price, when Gill accumulated a 5% stake in the company.
