A man passes by a GameStop location on 6th Avenue in New York, March 23, 2021.
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GameStop shares rallied more than 37% in the premarket Monday after “Roaring Kitty” posted for the first time in roughly three years.
The post, a picture on X of a video gamer leaning forward on their chair as to indicate he’s taking the game seriously, marked Roaring Kitty’s first post on the platform — or on Reddit— since 2021.
Kitty, whose legal name is Keith Gill, is one of the Reddit traders who drove the meme stock craze of 2021. Gill goes by DeepF——Value on Reddit. The trader helped attract retail interest in driving a massive short squeeze in the brick-and-mortar video game stock and call options between 2020 and 2021.
Gill was a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill encouraged a band of retail traders to squeeze out short selling hedge funds in GameStop.
Hedge fund Melvin Capital became a target of the army of amateur traders and suffered huge losses that prompted the Hedge fund arm of Citadel, as well as Point72, to infuse close to $3 billion into Melvin to backstop its finances.
The eye-dropping mania once forced brokerages including Robinhood to limit trading in heavily shorted stocks as it blew up their clearinghouse margin. A Robinhood user filed a class-action lawsuit following the app’s decision to restrict GameStop trading on its platform. Robinhood won the dismissal of this lawsuit in August 2023.
The volatility also spawned a series of Congressional hearings around brokers’ practices and gamifying retail trading, which involved the leaders of Robinhood, Melvin Capital, Reddit, Citadel as well as Gill.
In January 2021, shares hit an all-time intraday high of $120.75 per share. As retail interest faded the stock collapsed, along with other meme stocks like AMC. The shares last month hit a three-year low of $9.95.
GME 5-year chart
Recently, the stock has started to move higher again, which may have rekindled the trader’s interest. The stock is up 57% so far in May and closed Friday at $17.46.
