Keith Gill, known on Reddit under the pseudonym...

Keith Gill (Photo illustration by Pavlo Gonchar / Getty Images)

Roaring kitty

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.

7/1/24 1:36PM

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.

Keith Gill 13G — Keith Gill's 13G filing for Chewy Stock

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.

Max Knoblauch & David Crowther10h

Nike’s China business declines for seventh straight quarter, stock sinks as soft guidance outweighs Q3 earnings beat

Sportswear kingpin Nike reported results for its third quarter, which ended in February, after the bell Tuesday. At a headline-level, the fiscal Q3 numbers were pretty solid, with Nike reporting:

Earnings of $0.35 per share, comfortably above the Wall Street consensus of $0.29 per share compiled by FactSet.
$11.28 billion in total revenue, roughly in line with the $11.26 billion estimate.

However, weakness in China and a revenue forecast that implies sales will continue to drop are weighing on the shares, which are down more than 9% in early trading on Wednesday.

On the earnings call, management said that revenue is expected to drop 2% to 4% in the coming quarter, and that overall they "expect revenues to be down low-single-digits versus the prior year, with gains in North America offset by declines in Greater China." That's a disappointment to analysts, who were anticipating 2% growth in the coming quarter, and even more in the latter stages of the year, per Bloomberg.

Nike’s sales in China — where the company earns about 15% of its revenue — fell 7% to $1.62 billion. That’s its seventh straight quarter of sales declines in the market, though this quarter’s was less than feared. The company had issued weak guidance for this quarter considering continued softness in the region.

“This quarter we took meaningful actions to improve the health and quality of our business,” said Nike CEO Elliott Hill. “The pace of progress is different across the portfolio and the areas we prioritized first continue to drive momentum.”

Nike shares are trading near decade lows this month, as tariffs continue to weigh on profits and shipping costs rise amid the war with Iran. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was down 17% year to date.

Luke Kawa, Tasha Matsumoto

11h

Stocks end worst quarter since 2022 with best day since May

Optimism that the end of the war may be near sent stocks surging.

Max Knoblauch12h

Oil-sensitive travel stocks pop following Iran state media reporting on potential war resolution

Travel stocks are surging on Tuesday as oil prices fall following reports from Iranian state media that President Masoud Pezeshkian said the country has “the necessary will to end this war,” but would only do so with guarantees that “prevent the recurrence of aggression.”

The war has sent oil prices and refining margins surging this month, causing airlines and cruise lines to cut profit forecasts despite reported high demand.

Following Tuesday’s update, shares of the big four US airlines (Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines) all climbed, along with smaller rivals including JetBlue. US airlines have stopped fuel hedging in recent years, increasing their exposure to upward swings in oil prices.

Cruise stocks also rallied, with Carnival and Norwegian up more than 6% and Royal Caribbean up about 5%.

J. Edward Moreno15h

The FDA is expected to lift restrictions on certain peptides, the NYT reports

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to lift restrictions on certain peptides, allowing the experimental, often injectable substances to be sold by compounding pharmacies, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The potential move was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal, and teased by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast in late February.

Peptides have boomed in popularity recently, with search interest for “peptides” surpassing “ozempic” this month. Many of them are currently understudied and not approved for human use, a rule consumers are able to bypass by purchasing them from suppliers that sell them for, ostensibly, research purposes only.

As reports of the FDA changing its stance of peptides mount, consumer health companies like Hims & Hers and Superpower have been getting ready to roll out their peptide offerings as soon as they get the FDA's blessing.

The peptide gold rush: How impending deregulation could supercharge a shadow industry

Matt Phillips16h

Memory stocks bounce as Bernstein analyst calls TurboQuant fears “overdone”

Memory stocks rose Tuesday, after Bernstein analysts called the recent panic over Google’s TurboQuant AI algorithm “overdone.”

Bernstein analyst Mark Newman wrote:

“[Hard disk drive] and Memory stocks have sold off significantly due in part to fears from Google’s TurboQuant report. This however, should have zero impact on HDD demand and negligible impact on NAND demand. Given the stock sell-off we see this as an attractive entry point for Seagate Technology Holdings, Western Digital and Sandisk’s and upgrade WDC to Outperform.”

All three stocks were up early Tuesday, as was memory chip maker Micron.

Today’s rally stands in stark contrast to the pummeling these shares have endured over the last week, after Google Research published a technical paper on March 24 detailing its TurboQuant AI algorithm, which compresses the amount of data associated with AI operations without affecting the accuracy of AI models.

That was seen as a threat to surging AI demand for memory storage, which has supercharged prices for memory chips and memory-related stocks over the last year.