Roaring Kitty and the Resurgence of Meme Stocks

This week, Roaring Kitty (of $GME fame) returned to social media, and GameStop short sellers lost an estimated $1B from this morning’s monster rally.

Are meme stocks back?

We dive into this further, highlighting our Meme Stock Rankings dashboard.

A reminder that you can always try Quiver Premium for free 👇

In this newsletter, we also cover recent notable Congress trades, investigate potential financial misconduct by Rep. Troy Nehls, and discuss T-Mobile’s $2B acquisition of U.S. Cellular.

ARE MEME STOCKS BACK? GAMESTOP AND AMC SURGE

This image was all it took.

Keith Gill, famed as “Roaring Kitty,” resurfaced online on X after three years, reigniting the volatile meme stock market.

Back in 2021, Gill was pivotal in diverting GameStop’s trajectory away from near bankruptcy by instigating a "short squeeze" that compelled skeptics to buy at escalating prices.

His return ignited a surge in the notoriously unpredictable meme stock’s during Monday’s trading:

• GameStop (GME) soared by as much as 110% to $36.70.

• AMC (AMC) by as much 51% to $4.41 today, following the return of the 2021 WallStreetBets icon Roaring Kitty to X.

He followed his tweet with a YouTube video summarizing the bullish case for $GME, noting, "That's all for now cuz I'm out of breath. Here’s a quick 4min video I put together.”

This Monday’s market action saw trading halted 8x due to extreme volatility, echoing the drama Gill sparked in 2021 against major hedge funds shorting GameStop.

Our WallStreetBets dashboard first captured this frenzy before it became a mainstream sensation, one of Quiver's pioneering projects.

Today, it has evolved into the Meme Stock Rankings Dashboard, quantifying the latest trends and discussions on Reddit:

For more information check out our WallStreetBets Meme Stock Rankings dashboard below 👇

NOTABLE CONGRESS TRADES

• Last week we covered Senator Tommy Tuberville bought stock in a Humacyte (HUMA). A small biotech company that makes implantable human tissues. THE STOCK HAS NOW RISEN OVER 86% SINCE THEN AND IS UP 14% TODAY.

• Tuberville sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and has opposed legislation that would ban congressional stock trading. Arguing that it would cut down on the number of people who wanted to serve in Congress.

• As of May 2024, Rep Nancy Pelosi has gained approximately $7.2M in the stock market.

• Recent trade: Forge Investments, an investment fund with stakes in Databricks, a purchase ranging between $1M-$5M.

To see more Congress trades, details, and how they’ve performed since, check out our:

REP TROY NEHLS ACCUSED OF FINANCIAL MISCONDUCT

BREAKING: The Office of Congressional Ethics has released a report on alleged financial misconduct by Representative Troy Nehls.

We read the report, and did some investigating of our own.

Here's what we found:

The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) has claimed that Nehls may have converted campaign funds to personal use.

His campaign committee made payments to an LLC established by Nehls.

They were labeled as being used for campaign rent, but the OCE claims that might not be true.

The causes for suspicion seem to be:

1. The rent payments were sporadic.

2. There is no publicly available information linking the LLC to campaign headquarters.

3. A lack of cooperation from Nehls, his staff, and others.

Looking at images of the address listed as Nehls' headquarters, the sporadic payments seem reasonable.

The first image shown below is from January of 2020, shortly after payments to the LLC began. The second is from March of 2021, during a gap in the payments.

1. When payments resumed in December of 2021, the property transitioned back to "Freedom Hall".

2. When payments stopped in 2022, the property transitioned again.

It is somewhat odd that there appears to have been no written lease agreement between the LLC and the owner of this property.

Nehls claims to have had an "oral contract".

Here's part of his statement that indicates that random maintenance projects were part of the deal:

As it stands, it seems more likely a case of poor bookkeeping than a case of stealing funds to us.

However, we also don’t have full visibility into all of the evidence that the OCE had available when conducting their investigation.

Given that we've caught several Ethics Committee members violating the STOCK Act, Nehls certainly wouldn't be the first lawmaker guilty to violate disclosure rules.

T-MOBILE NEARS $2 BILLION ACQUISITION OF U.S. CELLULAR

T-Mobile US (TMUS) and Verizon Communications (VZ) are in discussions to carve up United States Cellular (USM) in separate transactions that could reshape the U.S. wireless landscape. According to sources familiar with the matter, T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to purchase a chunk of U.S. Cellular for over $2 billion, acquiring some of its operations and wireless spectrum licenses. The Wall Street Journal reports that talks with Verizon on a separate transaction are ongoing and may take longer to materialize or could potentially fall through.

Shares of U.S. Cellular, one of the last major regional wireless carriers, jumped 8.6% to $39.08 following the news. The regional carrier has been seeking buyers for its assets due to intensifying competition from national wireless providers and cable broadband companies. Its controlling shareholder, Telephone & Data Systems (TDS), which owns an 80% stake in U.S. Cellular, put the business up for sale last year. With more than 4,000 cellular towers and a market value of around $3 billion, U.S. Cellular's valuable spectrum portfolio covers 30 states and reaches approximately 51 million people.

Continued on our News Feed.