GameStop shares rose Monday after financial analyst and trader Roaring Kitty went online for the first time in nearly three years.
The popular analyst posted Roaring Kitty on social media for the first time since 2021. The post on X received 63,000 likes in 13 hours.
GameStop saw an 83.2 percent increase in the value of its shares after implementing the analyst. AMC, another meme stock, jumped 22% on Monday, while Reddit trading rose 17%.
Roaring Kitty, formally known as Keith Gill, is a former marketing manager at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Also known as DeepF——Value on Reddit, Gill recruited an army of so-called day traders who piled into video game stocks in 2020 and 2021 — including GameStop shares.
Through so-called “meme stocks,” individual investors targeted short sellers and hedge funds pessimistic about the prospects of GameStop and other companies, forcing them to cover their short positions and driving up the stock prices of the targeted companies. Currently, the short position in GameStop shares represents more than 24 percent of the shares that are freely tradeable, according to reports. CNBC.
The action sent the stock soaring to over $120 in early 2021 from just $3 in three months, and forced brokerage firms like Robinhood to limit trading in heavily shorted stocks. In response, a Robinhood user filed a class action lawsuit after the app decided to restrict GameStop trading on its platform. The lawsuit was dismissed in August 2023. Another class action lawsuit against Gill alleged that he posed as a novice trader despite being a licensed professional.
All this was followed by a series of congressional hearings on brokers' practices and retail trading. Executives from Robinhood, Melvin Capital, Reddit and Citadel, as well as Jill, also testified.
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