GameStop shares rose sharply on Monday after “Roaring Kitty” Keith Gill, the man at the heart of a 2021 stock market frenzy around the struggling video gaming chain, returned to Reddit with a post which appeared to show a $116m bet on the chain.
The stock soared by as much as 74%, before losing ground in volatile trading. By mid-morning, it was up by 31%.
Hours before Wall Street had officially opened for the day, roughly $390m worth of GameStop shares had changed hands by 5:53am ET.
It was the first post in three years from Gill’s Reddit account, where screenshots of his bullish GameStop trades had in 2021 triggered a rush of demand for “meme stocks” – often companies with weak fundamentals that gained a cult-like following through social media hype.
The screenshot posted on Sunday showed a GameStop holding of 5m, or 1.8% of its publicly available stock. It also showed $65.7m worth of GameStop call options, typically bought to express a bullish view, expiring on 21 June at a strike price of $20.
The screenshot has not been independently verified, and Gill has yet to comment beyond social media. Shares in GameStop also surged last month, when he resurfaced on X, formerly Twitter, with a string of cryptic posts.
“Keith Gill is putting his money where his tweets are, and some investors are clearly following his lead and rekindling interest in meme stocks,” said Ben Laidler, global markets strategist at the digital brokerage eToro.
Shares in GameStop have fallen dramatically since their extraordinary peak in early 2021, at the height of the so-called “meme stock” trading frenzy, when a string of companies were boosted by viral memes.
Questions have been raised, too, about the strength of GameStop’s business, which has endured a series of high-profile departures from its management team. In March, the chain cut an unspecified number of jobs to reduce costs and reported lower fourth-quarter revenue.
GameStop was trending No 1 on investor-focused social media platform stockstwits.com, indicating increased chatter among individual traders, while fellow meme stock AMC climbed by 13%.
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Monday’s surge also put GameStop short sellers on track to rack up nearly $1bn in paper losses, according to the data and analytics firm Ortex Technologies.
Gill’s last post from April 2021, titled “final update”, showed a holding of 200,000 GameStop shares worth $30.9m.
Reuters contributed reporting
