This is the meme that started a thousand trades. Shares of GameStop Corp and related meme coins soared Monday morning after retail trader Keith Gill, also known as “TheRoaringKitty,” hinted at a return to trading. share a meme X. Gill's stock price, also known as “DeepF***ingValue” on Reddit, is credited with sparking the 2021 GameStop rally, with the struggling video game retailer's stock price increasing 21x in two weeks It rose sharply and then fell sharply. It returns to pre-spike levels within a few days. Monday's post marks the end of Gil's three-year hiatus.
— Roaring Kitty (@TheRoaringKitty) May 13, 2024
GameStop stock rose 111% on Monday, but has since fallen by about half that amount, trading at about $30 as of noon ET.is another meme stock AMC Entertainment Holdings rose 12%. Meanwhile, over the past day, certain meme-his-coins seem to have been upset by this post. His GameStop coin GME, which is not affiliated with the company, rose more than 1,775%, according to CoinGecko data. According to data from DEXTools, the AMC token is up over 4,500%, and the cat-themed meme coin KITTY is also up over 8,000%.
The meme in question, a man sitting slouched at a desk, slouching, symbolizes the act of “lock-in,” or a period of high concentration, and X users view this post as “lock-in” in the trading market. It is interpreted as a rallying cry for the purpose of “Hey brother, what are we buying?” one user answered; Another “just in time for the meme coin supercycle” Added.
Roaring Kitty is back. pic.twitter.com/mzMjzKhI6a
— Wallstreetbets (@wallstreetbets) May 13, 2024
DEXTools data also shows that a large number of opportunistic tokens were minted over the past day. GameStop and STONKS (slang for meme stocks) each had market caps of more than $300,000 in the first 10 hours or so of trading, while other companies, such as TheRoaringKitty, had less than $1,000 in liquidity.
The meme market was abuzz following Gill's post due to his role in video game retailer GameStop's January 2021 short squeeze. GameStop is a brick-and-mortar video game retailer in the United States that was widely considered to be in poor financial health before its stock price soared. The company's stock price continued to decline for an extended period of time, from around $50 in early 2014 to an all-time low of just 64 cents in April 2020.
Gill began posting his company's analysis on Reddit in 2019, which gained traction during the coronavirus pandemic. He rose to prominence in 2021 when he told an online community of retail traders to buy GameStop options and take advantage of the company's stock. Within a month, the stock price rose from $4 to over $120. At its peak, Gill's $53,000 investment made him worth nearly $50 million, establishing Gill's cult status as a trader who made a fortune betting on hedge funds. In other words, playing his own game on Wall Street from the comfort of his bedroom. One hedge fund, Melvin Capital, lost billions of dollars betting on the decline in distressed stocks such as GameStop.
