NEW YORK — The man at the center of the pandemic meme stock craze appeared online for the first time in three years, sending the prices of his outlandish and volatile stocks soaring on Monday.
Keith Gill, better known as “Roaring Kitty,” posted an image on social platform X on Sunday of a man sitting forward in his chair, a meme used by gamers when things get serious.
He followed that tweet with a YouTube video from years earlier when he defended the embattled company GameStop saying, “That’s all for now because I’m out of breath. FYI, here’s a quick 4-minute video I put together to summarize the bull case.” of $GME.”
GameStop in 2021 was a video game retailer struggling to survive as consumers rapidly switched from discs to digital downloads. Large Wall Street hedge funds and mainstream investors were betting against it, or short-selling its shares, believing its shares would continue to trend sharply downward.
Gill and those who agreed with him changed the trajectory of a company that seemed headed for bankruptcy by buying thousands of shares of GameStop against almost any accepted metric that told investors the company was in serious trouble.
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 that Gill had reignited the phenomenon as GameStop shares more than doubled. At midday, shares were trading 60% higher. It’s the biggest intraday trading jump for GameStop since the meme craze of early 2021. Other meme stocks, such as movie theater chain AMC, were also driven higher.
Gill became a cause célèbre in 2021 after his posts on Reddit’s Wallstreetbets subcategory started a David and Goliath battle with large hedge funds betting heavily against GameStop’s survival.
The little guys won, at least for a while, sending GameStop stock up over 1000% in 2021 and other meme stocks as well. The struggling AMC movie theater chain jumped 2,300% in a very short period of time in the same year.
Some big traders posted colossal losses when GameStop went from less than $20 to nearly $400 each. Citron Research, Melvin Capital and other well-known hedge funds lost approximately $5 billion, according to analytics firm S3 Partners.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. joined the meme surge on Monday, jumping 33%. Koss Co., a headphone maker, soared 25% and BlackBerry, the once-dominant smartphone maker, rose 7%. The Retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond, another meme stock, sought bankruptcy protection last year.
Some meme stocks, including GameStop and AMC, had been rising rapidly earlier this month.
GameStop Corp. shares, which have fallen steadily since 2021, had already risen 57% this month. In January, GameStop reported its first annual profit since 2018, although it remains unclear whether Cohen’s turnaround plan will succeed.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. had risen 10% in the last 30 days.
Those companies erupted Monday after Gill’s tweet.
However, the market dynamics for companies like GameStop have changed.
When Gill and an online army of retail investors began buying GameStop shares, more than 140% of the company’s tradable shares were shorted. That distorted figure is arrived at because some traders were borrowing against stocks they were already shorted to make even bigger bets against the company, greatly increasing their losses when the stock began to rise.
Short positions against GameStop’s tradable shares now sit at just over 24%, slightly up from 22.5% in January.
Gill made huge profits investing in a troubled video game company, but denied when he appeared virtually at a congressional hearing that he had 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 had disappeared from message boards after posting a video in June 2021 of sleeping kittens.
The story of Roaring Kitty and the meme stock craze was made into a movie last year called “Dumb Money.”