‘Roaring Kitty’: How Reddit user roiled hedge funds

Massachusetts-based Youtuber Keith Gill is Gamestop bull

In mid-2019, a Reddit user — known as “Roaring Kitty” on some social media accounts — posted a picture on an online forum depicting a single $53,000 investment in the video-game retailer Gamestop. The post attracted little attention, except from a few people who mocked the bet on the struggling company. “This dude should sell now,” a Reddit user named cmcewen wrote at the time.

But Roaring Kitty was not deterred. Over the next year, he began tweeting frequently about Gamestop and making Youtube and Tiktok videos about his investment. He also started livestreaming his financial ideas. Other Reddit users with monikers like Ackilles and Bowlerguy92 began following his every move and piling into Gamestop.

Roaring Kitty — who is Keith Gill, 34, a former financial educator for an insurance firm in Massachusetts — has now become a central figure in this week’s stock market frenzy. Inspired by him and a small crew of individual investors who gathered around him, hordes of young online traders took Gamestop’s stock on a wild ride, pitting themselves against sophisticated hedge funds and upending Wall Street’s norms in the process.

Their actions — pushing up Gamestop’s price by buying so-called options contracts that offer a cheap way to bet on a stock’s direction — have shocked established investors because Gill and his online comrades are the antithesis of the Wall Street titans who have long ruled the stock market.

Working far from well-heeled financial offices, Gill and his fans socialized on Reddit and Youtube and used no-fee online trading platforms like Robinhood and Webull. Many were so devoted to their Gamestop investment that they spent hours each week chatting in the comments section of Gill’s videos, delving into the company’s financial filings and arcane details about free-cash flow and video game consoles. Their show of force this week underlines how the financial markets have changed by merging with the world of social media and a younger generation of traders who have been empowered by online platforms. It has also made some in this new generation wildly wealthy.

On Tuesday, Gill posted a picture on Reddit that showed his $53,000 bet on Gamestop had soared in value to $48 million. The post was “upvoted” more than 140,000 times by other users.