Meme stock guru makes his return
‘Roaring Kitty’ sends some stocks soaring
The man at the center of the pandemic meme stock craze appeared online for the first time in three years, sending the prices of the quirky and volatile shares sharply higher Monday.
Keith Gill, better known as “Roaring Kitty,” posted an image Sunday on the social platform X of a man sitting forward in his chair, a meme used by gamers when things are getting serious.
He followed that tweet with a Youtube video from years before when he championed the beleaguered company Gamestop saying, “That’s all for now cuz I’m out of breath.
FYI here’s a quick 4min video I put together to summarize the $GME bull case.”
Gamestop in 2021 was a video game retailer that was struggling to survive as consumers switched rapidly from discs to digital downloads. Big Wall Street hedge funds and major investors were betting against it, or shorting its stock, believing that its shares would continue on a drastically downward trend.
Gill and those who agreed with him changed the trajectory of a company that appeared to headed for bankruptcy by buying up thousands of Gamestop shares in the face of almost any 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.
At Monday’s opening bell it appeared that Gill had reignited the phenomenon as shares of Gamestop more than doubled. At midday, shares were trading 60 percent higher. It’s the biggest intraday trading jump for Gamestop since the meme craze of early 2021. Other meme stocks like the theater chain AMC were jolted higher as well.
Trading in Gamestop was halted eight times before noon on Monday due to volatility.
Gill became a cause célèbre in
2021 after his posts on the Reddit subcategory Wallstreetbets ignited a David vs. Goliath battle with large hedge funds that were betting heavily against the survival of Gamestop.
The small guys won, at least for a while, driving shares of Gamestop up more than 1,000 percent in 2021 and other meme stocks as well. The struggling movie theater chain AMC jumped 2,300 percent in a very short span of time in the same year.
Some big traders posted collosal losses as Gamestop raced from less than $20, to close to $400 each. Citron Research, Melvin Capital and other well-known hedge funds lost an estimated $5 billion, according to analytics firm S3 Partners.
Some of those new and smaller investors believed, at least in part, that Ryan Cohen, co-founder of Chewy. com, could push the traditional retailer in a more online direction. Cohen built up a stake in Gamestop before eventually joining the board and last year becoming its CEO.
Joining the meme surge Monday was AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which leapt 33 percent. Koss Co. a headphone manufacturer, spiked 25 percent and Blackberry, the one time dominant smartphone maker, rose 7 percent. The retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond, another meme stock, sought bankruptcy protection last year.
Some meme stocks, including Gamestop and AMC, had been climbing earlier this month, and rapidly.