By Manya Saini, Suzanne McGee and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed
(Reuters) -GameStop’s shares jumped on Thursday after a cryptic post from meme stock influencer Keith Gill, who shot to notoriety after his online personas and bullish bets on the video game retailer sparked a trading frenzy among mom-and-pop investors.
Gill posted a picture resembling a Time magazine cover from 2006 with a computer screen on social media platform X. Following his post, GameStop’s shares spiked and traded as high as $30.87. The stock closed up 6%.
Known as “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube and “DeepF***ingValue” on Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets, Gill was a key figure in the so-called “Reddit rally”, in which GameStop stock surged 1,600% at one point in Jan. 2021, crushing hedge funds that had bet against the videogame retailer.
Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, noted that this is characteristic of a pattern that has evolved in the trading of GameStop: the stock’s price will rally, then when it settles down a bit or retreats, Gill’s “Roaring Kitty” persona tends to emerge with a social media post.
“We’ve seen that pattern again recently; the stock was at $21 earlier in November but then rallied to $30 or so around Thanksgiving, only to give back most of those gains over the last couple of days.”
On Thursday, about 300,000 GameStop options contracts had changed hands by 2:14 p.m. (1914 GMT), at about 1.5 times the usual pace, according to data from options analytics firm Trade Alert.
The stock’s 30-day implied volatility — how much traders expect the shares to move around over the short term — jumped to a 3-week high of 132%, up from 93% in the previous session, data showed.
Contracts betting on the shares finishing above $30 by Friday were the most actively traded options, with some 32,000 of them traded by late afternoon.
‘ANIMAL SPIRITS’
Gill resurfaced on social media earlier in 2024, after a three-year hiatus leading to a deluge of excited messages from his followers, many of whom have likened the social media phenomenon to a David who took on Wall Street’s Goliaths and won.
“The re-emergence of the popularity of meme stocks tends to follow any general resurgence in market enthusiasm and animal spirits,” said Art Hogan, market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management. “Whenever markets are at or near all-time highs, that particular part of the speculative side of stocks tends to pop up again.”
The meme stock rally in 2021 was set off by Gill’s posts on WallStreetBets subreddit about the gains he had made on his investments in the highly shorted firm.
The rally spread to other highly shorted stocks including AMC Entertainment as Reddit users banded together to squeeze bearish hedge funds, costing them billions in losses and drawing scrutiny from U.S. regulators.
The entire episode inspired Craig Gillespie’s 2023 movie “Dumb Money”.
Other so-called meme stocks also traded higher on Thursday after Gill’s post. Shares of Unity Software closed up 5%, while cinema chain AMC, another darling of retail investors from 2021, climbed 6%.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if the faithful haven’t been distracted by other things. Crypto has stolen GameStop’s thunder recently,” Sosnick said.
The video game retailer’s stock is up around 76% so far this year. Meanwhile, bitcoin has surged more than 130% and surpassed the $100,000 mark earlier on Thursday, fueled by optimism over easing regulatory headwinds, in what is a stunning rally for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru, Suzanne McGee in Providence, Rhode Island and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed in New York; Editing by Alan Barona)
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