Excerpt:
The filing argues that Gill’s Roaring Kitty/DeepFuckingValue persona was a ruse, intended to hide his status as an industry professional who’d bought GameStop at prices averaging $5. The filing curiously doesn’t include Gill’s (presumably not faked) E*Trade account shots as part of the ruse, since any registered rep is normally required to trade only though his employer.1
The tricky part is that securities fraud, and this is a securities fraud case, requires establishing intent, which the lawyers call scienter, as in knowing in advance that what they were doing was wrong. The fact that Gill has so many securities licenses will make it pretty much impossible for him to pretend that he didn’t know what the relevant rules were. So his defense is likely to rest on “Gee, I thought this was a great trade. How was I to know so many people would agree and make the same bet?”
The filing makes a good go at pre-rebutting that. Even though Gill initially depicted his YouTube channel as being about general financial education, it became more and more fixated on GameStop, with “at least” 56 of 80 presentations devoted to it, and many of them discussing its vulnerability to a short squeeze. Virtually all of his tweets from July 2020 were about GameStop.
Author(s): Yves Smith
Publication Date: 18 February 2021
Publication Site: naked capitalism