The man at the center of the pandemic meme stock craze appeared online for the first time in three years and sent GameStop shares soaring on Monday.
Keith Gill, better known as ‘Roaring Kitty’, posted an image of a man sitting forward in his chair – a meme used by players when things get serious.
The stock surged a staggering 119 percent at one point on Monday, causing $1 billion in losses to so-called short sellers who continued to bet that the video game retailer would go bankrupt.
It was a throwback to 2021 when GameStop made headlines for a ‘brief drawdown’ in its stock. At the time, it was a video game retailer struggling to survive as consumers rapidly switched from discs to digital downloads.
The big Wall Street hedge funds were betting against him or selling his shares short, hoping he would go bankrupt. But Gill and his fans disagreed and bought millions of GameStop shares.
That started what’s known as a “short squeeze,” when big investors who had bet against GameStop were forced to buy its rapidly growing shares to offset their massive losses.
At Monday’s opening bell, it appeared Gill had reignited that phenomenon, as GameStop shares more than doubled from Friday’s close to $17.46.
Keith Gill, also known as ‘Roaring Kitty,’ talks about Gamestop and other stocks on his YouTube channel in 2021. On Monday he tweeted for the first time in three years and Gamestock shares rose as much as 100 percent.
Keith Gill, better known as ‘Roaring Kitty’, posted an image of a man sitting forward in his chair on Sunday. It is a meme used by gamers when things get serious.
GameStop shares rose on Monday, hitting their highest level in 18 months
They hit an 18-month high of $38.20 and even after falling slightly were trading 67 percent higher as of 1:30 p.m.
“Short covering is to be expected on this stock,” said Ihor Dusaniwsky of data firm S3 Partners.
He said that just an hour into trading on Monday, short-selling hedge funds had lost $1 billion, at least on paper.
It’s the biggest intraday trading jump for GameStop since the meme craze in 2021. Other meme stocks, such as movie theater chain AMC, also shot higher.
Gill became a hero for small retail investors in 2021 thanks to his posts in Reddit’s Wallstreetbets subcategory. the publications It ignited a David and Goliath battle with large hedge funds betting heavily against GameStop’s survival, shorting its shares.
The little guys won, at least for a while, sending GameStop shares up more than 1,000 percent in 2021, and other meme stocks as well. The struggling AMC movie theater chain rose 2.30 percent in the same year.
And some big traders lost billions.
Citron Research, Melvin Capital and other well-known hedge funds lost about $5 billion on the other side of the trade in 2021, according to analytics firm S3 Partners.
Gill and other investors in GameStop were betting, in part, on Chewy.com co-founder Ryan Cohen’s ability to push the brick-and-mortar retailer in a more online direction.
Cohen built up a stake in GameStop before eventually joining the board and last year. become its CEO.
However, it wasn’t just GameStop that caught fire on Monday. Some of the same meme stocks that posted astronomical gains in 2021 also rose.
AMC jumped 33 percent. Koss, a headphone maker, rose 25% and BlackBerry, the once-dominant smartphone maker, rose 7%. Retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond, another meme stock, sought bankruptcy protection last year.
However, some meme stocks, including GameStop and AMC, had already been rising earlier this month, and quickly.
GameStop shares, which have fallen steadily since 2021, had risen 57 percent this month. In January, GameStop reported its first annual profit since 2018, although it remains unclear whether Cohen’s turnaround plan will succeed.
AMC had risen 10 percent in the last 30 days.
Chart shows GameStop stock price over five days
The story of Roaring Kitty was made into a film. This image provided by Sony Pictures shows Paul Dano as Keith Gill in a scene from ‘Dumb Money.’
Gill made huge profits by investing in a troubled video game company, but denied it when appeared virtually at a congressional hearing who used social media to drive up GameStop’s stock price.
At the time he simply told lawmakers: “I like the stock.”
As Roaring Kitty, Gill disappeared from message boards after posting a video in June 2021 of kittens going to sleep.
The story of Roaring Kitty and the meme stock craze was turned into a movie last year it was called ‘Dumb Money’.
