(Reuters) – GameStop’s (GME) shares jumped Thursday after a cryptic posting by meme-marketing influencer Keith Gill, who rose to prominence after his online persona and bullish bets on the video game retailer sparked a trading frenzy among mom-and-pop investors.
Gill posted a photo of a Time magazine cover with a computer screen on social media platform X. GameStop shares jumped after his announcement, last gaining 13% late in the day.
Known as “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube and “DeepF***ingValue” on the popular WallStreetBets Reddit, Gill was a key figure in the so-called “Reddit rally” that sent GameStop stock up 1,600% in January 2021. , defeating hedge funds that had bet against the video game retailer.
About 300,000 GameStop options contracts changed hands by 2:14 p.m. (1914 GMT) on Thursday, about 1.5 times the normal pace, according to data from analyst firm Trade Alert.
The stock’s 30-day implied volatility — how much traders expect a stock to move in the short term — jumped to a 3-week high of 132%, up from 93% in the previous session, data showed.
Contracts betting on the stock, which reached above $30 by Friday, were the most actively traded options, with about 32,000 of them traded by late afternoon.
Gill re-emerged on social media earlier in 2024 after a three-year hiatus, prompting a wave of excited messages from his followers, many of whom likened the social media phenomenon to David fighting the Goliaths of Wall Street and winning.
The stock meme rally in 2021 was sparked by Gill’s posts on the WallStreetBets subreddit about the profits he made on his investment in a heavily shorted firm.
The rally spread to other stocks, including AMC, as Reddit users banded together to squeeze out bearish hedge funds, costing them billions in losses and drawing scrutiny from U.S. regulators.
The entire episode inspired Craig Gillespie’s 2023 film Dumb Money.
(Reporting by Mani Saini in Bengaluru and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed in New York; Editing by Alan Barona)
