Shares in GameStop (GME) rocketed over 110% Monday morning, forcing the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to issue a liquidity pause on the holding after a Sunday night tweet from Roaring Kitty, the Twitter user who helped spur the retail investor revolution in 2021.
Roaring Kitty posted a photo of a video game player sitting up in his chair, indicating a shift in demeanor and a general attitude of getting serious about trading efforts. The post was the user’s first tweet since June 2021.
— Roaring Kitty (@TheRoaringKitty) May 13, 2024
Shares of GME soared to $26.34 per share at the opening of markets Monday, according to MarketWatch, and continued to climb to over $30 per share before NYSE issued a temporary Limit Up Limit Down pause.
While well shy of its 2021 all-time high of $86.88, the $30 range represents the first time the stock has breached the $30 mark since August 2022.
The stock had been gaining momentum in recent weeks, rallying from a yearly low of $10.01 per share on April 22 to Friday’s $17.46 close. Institutional investors had apparently poured a ton of money into shorting the stock, IronHawk Financial‘s Managing Director Joseph Lombardi told the Daily Caller.
“He saw a hole, there was too much money in these shorts, you know, $1.34 billion in May month-to-month losses and now another billion for the year,” Lombardi told the Daily Caller.
“He was just waiting until, basically there was an invert,” Lombardi added.
Trading in GME has since resumed and sits at $28.80 at the time of publication. (RELATED: REPORT: Google Deleted Nearly 100,000 Negative Ratings From Robinhood)
The operator of the Roaring Kitty account, who Reuters identified as former financial advisor Keith Gill in 2021, testified to Congress in February 2021 and went viral for his simple four-word justification of why he led a charge to boost the stock despite the hundreds of millions of dollars institutional investors and hedge funds poured into betting against it.
“I like the stock,” Gill professed to the House Committee on Financial Services in 2021 amidst a wave of scrutiny.
Gill’s retail revolution sparked a massive wave of controversy and forced trading platform Robinhood to temporarily shut down trading on the GME stock, citing volatility. Robinhood also shut down a number of other popular “meme stocks” that had been targeted by Gill and other retail investors in the popular Reddit thread Wall Street Bets. Retail investors targeted GME and other stocks like AMC due to the large short positions institutional investors and large hedge funds had taken against them. (RELATED: GameStop Investors Who Beat Wall Street Have Their Communications Restricted On Discord)
“Because GameStop and AMC were like a revolution against the hedge funds, it had a lot of backing because Americans are sick and tired of having a boot around their neck by the ultra-elites,” Lombardi explained.
“So, there’s a way they can get back, to fight back, because we’re literally going into a machine gun fight with a billy club,” Lombardi stated.
