How a cartoon from ‘Roaring Kitty’ sparked a $6.1 billion Wall Street frenzy

Is there a sequel coming for the 2023 film Dumb Money? With meme mania – and the man who helped trigger the original retail investor revolt against Wall Street – resurfacing in the US after a three-year hiatus, the raw material for a follow-up might be developing.

On Monday in the US, shares in the original meme stock, struggling video game retailer GameStop, soared. At one point, they were up almost 120 per cent before closing “only” 74 per cent higher, adding about $US4 billion ($6.1 billion) to the company’s market capitalisation.

He’s back: Keith Gill is thought to have turned a $US50,000 investment in GameStop into a nearly $US50 million fortune. Credit: YouTube

That surge came after the shares had already risen more than 57 per cent since the start of the month – at their closing price of $US30.45, GameStop’s shares are up 175 per cent this month and its market capitalisation has rocketed from $US3.4 billion to $US9.3 billion.

Other stocks that featured in the 2021 episode of meme stock mania, like AMC Entertainment (up 79 per cent) and some, like Blackberry, now regarded in the same light, were also swept up in the return of the chatroom day traders. A bevy of meme coins (crypto assets) referencing GameStop and Gill’s social media handles suddenly appeared.

While it is a far cry from the prices above $US81 GameStop shares reached in early 2021 at the height of the meme stock craze, there is a common spark to what occurred then and now.

In 2021, Keith Gill, a former financial analyst who posts on social media under the tag Roaring Kitty and has a Reddit handle of “DeepF...ingValue,” was a key figure in the assault by retail investors against the hedge funds that had shorted the entire free float in the market for GameStop shares.

It was his conviction – shared on Reddit and in YouTube videos – that the shares were severely undervalued and the short sellers were vulnerable that ignited a wave of retail buying of shares. This was not just GameStop’s but other faltering companies such as AMC in what was partly populist backlash against Wall Street and partly simple fun by Millennials who decided investing was just another form of gaming.

On Monday, a post appeared in Gill’s Roaring Kitty account on X depicting a man leaning forwards in his chair with what appeared to be a gaming controller in his hand.

Within hours, the post had been viewed more than 10 million times and GameStop shares were on the move. Gill followed up that post with others, including a video containing clips of comic book heroes and villains preparing for a battle.

His first tweets since 2021 prompted an enthusiastic response within the Reddit WallStreetBets chatroom that was central to the previous GameStop play, generally along the lines that “he’s back” and “oh, we are so back”.

In their earlier incarnation, the meme stock investors, banding together within the chatrooms, aggressively targeted struggling companies with limited liquidity in the markets for their shares and high levels of shorting.

GameStop, which owns EB Games in this market, is still struggling, even though it made its first profit ($US6.7 million) in years last financial year after heavy cost-cutting.

Its sales of its video games continue to fall – they were down from $US5.9 billion to $US5.3 billion – because of its failure to adapt to the shift in its industry towards the direct downloading of games from their creators’ websites.

It’s in much the same place as it was three years ago – shrinking because of the anachronistic nature of its business model.

While its shares have been shorted, with about a quarter of the free float in the shares on loan, there isn’t the same capacity to impose the intense short squeeze that drove GameStop’s share price to extremely irrational levels in the last episode, which probably explains why the shares fell back.

There are unconfirmed estimates that hedge funds are sitting on about $US1 billion of paper losses, but the sector is a lot more wary of meme stocks than it was three years ago, when one of their peers, Melvin Capital, lost half its assets and needed a $US2.75 billion bail-out to survive. It closed its doors in 2022.

It’s also unlikely that the retail investors are quite as awash with cash as they were in 2021, when vast amounts of stimulus cash were being poured into their accounts in response to the pandemic, or as bored and looking for excitement as they were during pandemic lockdowns.

Today, interest rates are high, as are cost of living pressures, and there is no free money for gambling.

At one point GameStop shares were up almost 120 per cent before closing 74 per cent higher.Credit: AP

The fact that a lot of retail investors lost a lot of money when the price imploded in 2021 (and some of the Wall Street institutions they loathed walked away with billions before the music stopped) might also influence the way this latest bout of GameStop enthusiasm develops.

Last year, before each screening of Dumb Money, an Australian Securities and Investments Commission advertisement was shown, urging investors to ignore social media hype and warning that social media could be used to promote misleading information.

ASIC said at the time it was keeping a close eye on social media-driven “stock-ramming” and “pump and dump” schemes as well as apps that sought to “gamify” share trading. (No-cost platforms such as Robinhood played a central role in facilitating the meme stock mania).

Gill, who is thought to have turned a $US50,000 investment in GameStop into nearly $US50 million, told a 2021 congressional inquiry that the idea that he had used social media to promote the stock to “unwitting investors” was “preposterous”.

“I made it abundantly clear that my channel was for educational purposes only. Whether other investors bought the stock was irrelevant to my thesis,” he said.

So do we assume that his reappearance after three years and his posts – that don’t directly reference GameStop – are for educational purposes only? Or is he trying to reprise what was, whether deliberately or fortuitously, a very profitable strategy from 2021?

Could it be successful again, in a very different environment, where there is probably a lot less “dumb money”?

If another meme stock frenzy develops, ASIC might have to consider posting its ad on social media.

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