GameStop shares soar 80% and are halted as trader 'Roaring Kitty' who drove meme craze resurfaces
GameStop shares rallied more than 80% on Monday after "Roaring Kitty," the man who inspired the epic short squeeze of 2021, posted online for the first time in roughly three years.
The post, a picture on X of a video gamer leaning forward on their chair as if to indicate he's taking the game seriously, marked Roaring Kitty's first post on the platform — or on Reddit — since 2021. The post garnered 63,000 likes in 13 hours.
Trading in GameStop was halted multiple times due to volatility in morning trading. AMC, another meme stock, jumped 22% Monday, while Reddit traded 11% higher.
Roaring Kitty, whose legal name is Keith Gill, is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Also known as DeepF------Value on Reddit, Gill drew an army of day traders who cheered each other on and piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock, and GameStop call options, between 2020 and 2021.
The "meme stock" frenzy involved individual investors taking aim at short sellers and hedge funds who were pessimistic about the outlook for GameStop and other companies, forcing them to cover their short positions and drive up the price of the target stocks. Currently, the short position in GameStop shares amounts to more than 24% of all its shares that are freely available to trade, also known as the float.
