E-Trade considering removing Keith Gill from platform: WSJ

E-Trade, the trading platform owned by Morgan Stanley (MS), is considering removing GameStop trader Keith Gill from its platform due to concerns about potential market manipulation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Gill rose to fame as “Roaring Kitty,” the meme stock trader that fueled the rally in GameStop (GME) shares in 2021. On Sunday night, a social media account linked to Gill posted a screenshot showing a trading account with a $175 million stake in the video game retailer. The post sent GameStop shares surging 21% on Monday. The report says those inside E-Trade are debating whether the account’s actions count as manipulation and what sort of backlash the company could face if they remove Gill from the platform.

Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton discuss the report in the video above.

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This post was written by Stephanie Mikulich.

Video Transcript

Well, the meme stock trade has been back in focus and now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that E trade is considering taking Keith Gill off his uh off the platform.

The uh trader known as deep effing value.

I think we can, we can call him here.

Um Who of course, as we’ve been talking about had posted uh or someone purporting to be him, we haven’t confirmed it is him has purported to show a rather large business of 5 million shares, including some options trades in gamestop.

And apparently according to the journal, there has been this debate going on internally at Morgan Stanley which owns e trade about concerns as the securities and exchange commission.

Also, according to this story is looking into his options trade and because people follow him is this considered market manipulation, you asked Chris Murphy about this earlier.

So there’s that concern on the one hand, on the other hand, there’s a concern of what happens, reputation.

What happens with his so called meme army if they do take him off the platform.

So they’ve been trying to sort of weigh those various elements.

Yeah, he does.

I mean to your point.

I mean, listen, we’ve talked, he, he is a focal point of a lot of discussion.

Millions of people watch uh Mr Gill closely.

They monitor, they follow him followers on X.

He just on that platform.

He has more than more than a million it sounds like.

Um according again, according to the journal Julie, that the debate about him kind of as a client inside Morgan Stanley, they started kind of talking about this.

According to the journal a few weeks ago, no decision has been made.

Um And obviously the firm could decide to take no action at all but worth monitoring.