Chewy slides after filing shows third-biggest shareholder, 'Roaring Kitty,' sold his stake

WASHINGTON (AP) — Shares of Chewy slid close to 2% in overnight trading Wednesday after a regulatory filing revealed that the meme stock trader known as Roaring Kitty had sold his stake in the online pet store.

A beneficial ownership filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission posted Tuesday showed that Roaring Kitty, whose legal name is Keith Gill, had sold all of his shares in Chewy, which amounted to a 6.6% stake.

Plantation, Florida-based Chewy fell 1.9% after hours, to $26.19 per share.

Gill, an investor at the center of the meme stock craze, acquired more than 9 million shares of Chewy in July that made him the company's third-biggest shareholder.

Gill made a name for himself in 2021, when he rallied retail investors around GameStop. At the time, the video game retailer was struggling to survive — and big Wall Street hedge funds and major investors were betting against it, or shorting its stock. But Gill and those who agreed with him changed GameStop’s trajectory by buying up thousands of shares in the face of almost all accepted metrics that told investors that the company was in serious trouble.

That began what is known as a “short squeeze,” when those big investors that had bet against GameStop were forced to buy its rapidly rising stock to offset their massive losses.

Gill has said he has faith in the ability of GameStop’s Chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen to modernize the company after what he did at Chewy. Cohen co-founded Chewy in 2011. He stepped down from his role as Chewy’s CEO in 2018.