Shares of Chewy rose 15% premarket on Monday, before reversing sharply, after a filing showed Keith Gill, the stock influencer known as “Roaring Kitty”, had picked up a 6.6% stake in the pet products e-retailer.
The turbulent rally comes days after the investor, known for triggering the meme-stock rally of 2021, posted an uncaptioned picture of a puppy on the social media platform X that briefly sent Chewy shares to a near one-year high on Thursday.
Shortly after the New York Stock Exchange opened on Monday, Chewy reversed all its gains and entered the red. By 10am, it was down 1.6%.
The filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which lists Gill as the reporting person, included a section “Check the appropriate box to designate whether you are a cat” under which the descriptor “I am not a cat” was checked.
The SEC, Chewy and Gill did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The filing showed that Gill owns 9m shares of Chewy, equating to a stake worth about $245m at the stock’s Friday closing price of $27.24. The stake would make Gill Chewy’s third-largest shareholder, according to LSEG data.
Meme stocks – boosted by memes on social media – first emerged as a force three years ago, when amateur traders mobilized on platforms including Reddit to boost shares in GameStop.
Their bids triggered an extraordinary, but fleeting, increase in GameStop’s stock market value. It also left hedge funds that had bet against the company nursing heavy losses.
Gill, who led an army of retail investors backing GameStop, is known for his posts on Reddit – where he is known as “DeepFuckingValue” – and YouTube. While silent on the platforms for years after 2021’s frenzy, he has re-emerged in recent months.
Shares of Chewy, which sells pet food as well as medicine online, have risen 15% so far in 2024 but declined in the three preceding years as spending on pets slowed after a post-pandemic boom.
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Its sales have been stable in the past few quarters despite weaker consumer spending on discretionary items. “Pet humanization” is a key part of Chewy’s strategy, in which owners splurge on pets as they are considered a part of the family.
Some analysts said last week that Gill’s interest in Chewy could also be influenced by the fact that the pet retailer was founded by GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen.