In May, stock trader turned meme coin influencer Roaring Kitty announced his comeback on social media. Notably, even though his first tweet didn’t mention the GameStop stock, the financial instrument saw its price double within 24 hours. What’s more, the GME meme coin rose 1,900% within the same timeframe.
So, how did Keith Gill, popularly known as Roaring Kitty, become famous? He rose to fame in 2020 when he started to promote the Gamestop stock. His campaign caused a short squeeze on the stock, leading him to testify in the US Congress.
Roaring Kitty tweeted for the first time in over two years on May 12. He shared the popular meme of a man sitting on a chair while holding a game controller. The tweet was enough to push the GME stock and the GME meme coin to new levels. However, after a few days of posting video clips, Roaring Kitty went silent again, leaving many to wonder whether the revival was over.
But no, he did disappear! About a week and a half later, Roaring Kitty wrote a post with the title “GME YOLO Update” on his Reddit account DeepValue. In the post, he informed his followers that his GME holding was worth $200 million. The announcement caused the stock to rally again.
On June 5, Gill went live on YouTube after three years of inactivity. His livestream attracted more than 600,000 viewers.
Before the Fame
Before Roaring Kitty took the stock market by storm, he had dreams of becoming a successful athlete. In a past Wall Street Journal interview, the prominent trader said he quit his racing dream in 2018 following an injury. A year later, he was hired as a financial wellness expert by life insurance firm MassMutual. Gill opened a Reddit account a few months later and started to share his views on various stocks. In 2020, he focused fully on the GameStop stock and began to explain why he believed the asset would perform tremendously in the future.
The GameStop Stock
When Roaring Kitty began campaigning for GME, GameStop was struggling to keep its gaming business afloat, and most hedge funds and institutional investors were convinced that the firm’s stock would crash. Therefore, they opened short positions on the asset. For starters, short positions are bets on a particular asset that will decline in value.
Roaring Kitty noticed that several short positions were placed near $5.16, the price of GME stock at the time. He saw an opportunity to fuel a short squeeze (a scenario where the value of a tradable asset increases rapidly as short traders get liquidated). In his Reddit account, he said the GameStop stock was undervalued and that it had legs to reach new levels. His campaign proved successful as many retailer traders started buying the GME stock, whose price rose significantly, prompting institutional investors like Melvin Capital to sell their short positions.
Two days after GME started rallying, Robinhood, a go-to trading platform for most retail traders, blocked users from buying more GME stock, which had already skyrocketed to $490. The move pulled the asset to $193.
When Roaring Kitty appeared before the United States Congress on February 18, 2021, he dismissed allegations that he was an institutional investor looking to generate revenue for his clients. The stock trader argued that he didn’t have clients and that his posts about GME were based purely on his analysis and research.
Roaring Kitty’s Return
The return of Roaring Kitty has been welcomed by the crypto community, with many members asking the trader to tell them the crypto assets they should buy in this bull market. Moreover, Gill has inspired the launch of hundreds of meme coins on the Solana blockchain, with some recording massive gains.
Roaring Kitty’s success story has also inspired some social media influencers, including Andrew Tate, who recently said that he planned to dump his $500,000 worth of Bitcoin holdings to buy the Gamestop stock.
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