Courtesy of Pam Martens
Keith Gill, As He Appeared on a MassMutual Website on April 29, 2020 (Source: Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine)
Yesterday evening, CNN’s Erin Burnett told millions of viewers that it was “amateur traders” who had taken on the powerful Wall Street hedge funds to pump up the share price of GameStop. The New York Post also called Keith Gill, the man who initiated the frenzy in GameStop shares, an “amateur investor.” This characterization of Gill fits with the broader mainstream media narrative that this is an exciting David versus Goliath story. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way of that narrative.
Wall Street On Parade has confirmed that Keith Patrick Gill, a man holding highly sophisticated licenses to trade and supervise others on Wall Street, is the same man using multiple identities to promote GameStop on social media platforms. Gill, and a member of his family, have confirmed to other media outlets that Gill used the identity of DeepF***ingValue on Reddit’s WallStreetBets message board to promote GameStop and that he used the identity of Roaring Kitty on his YouTube channel and Twitter page to help engineer a short squeeze against the hedge funds that were betting the price of GameStop would fall.
Keith Gill, Saluting Ryan Cohen on Gill’s YouTube Channel, Roaring Kitty. Cohen’s RC Ventures Had a 13 Percent Stake in GameStop
Gill was a clean cut Registered Rep at MassMutual by day and a long-haired, head-banded, fast-talking stock promoter on social media by night, sending out video promotions for GameStop that were filmed at a trading desk he had set up in his basement. (See this YouTube video by Gill. It has a caption suggesting GameStop could go from $5 to $50.)
This is highly likely to be a serious problem for both Gill and MassMutual. A genuine amateur trader could plead ignorance of industry rules about hyping stocks to the public. A heavily licensed industry professional cannot. The fact that Gill passed all those exams means that he knows what the rules are. In addition, the broker-dealer unit of MassMutual, MML Investor Services LLC, that employed Gill as a Registered Rep, could potentially face charges of failure to supervise.
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