An online brokerage owned by Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) is considering removing infamous meme stock trader Keith Gill, who goes by the moniker Roaring Kitty, due to concerns about potential stock manipulation.
GameStop shares flew 75% higher when markets opened on Monday after Gill, who rose to fame in the 2021 meme stock frenzy, posted a supersized GameStop trade on Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) worth around $116 million.
Meme traders took it as a rallying call to buy the stock again, though 'paper-handed' traders (a term used in meme-trading circles to describe someone without the patience to hold) were quick to cash out their profits and the stock eventually closed the session just 22% higher.
Roaring Kitty's GME trade, posted on r/Superstonk
Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS)’s E*Trade platform took umbrage at this potential act of market manipulation.
Sources told The Wall Street Journal that the platform is considering booting Gill aka Roaring Kitty off, though no official decision has been announced.
One pundit discussing the matter on CNBC’s Squawk Box said it was “not insider trading per se, I don’t know what it is, it smells really funny… What about the people who sold those calls and are now getting squeezed?”
Responses to the video on subreddit r/Superstonk, where Gill posted his trade, were unsurprisingly unsympathetic.