[News Figures] 'Kiss Jill,' Who Led the 'Meme Stock' Craze, Is Back

GameStop surged 74.4%, AMC Entertainment jumped 78.4%. On the 13th (local time) in the New York stock market, these stocks attracted attention by soaring more than 70% in a single day. Both stocks share the common factor that the price surge was driven by a post on the X (formerly Twitter) account ‘Roaring Kitty’.

Keith Gill testifying at the virtual hearing related to GameStop held in Washington, USA, on February 18, 2021. [Image source=AP Yonhap News]

Roaring Kitty is the account of Keith Gill, who led the GameStop buying campaign in 2021. After resuming activity for the first time in three years, he posted an image on his account showing a man holding a game joystick, initially leaning back comfortably in a chair, then straightening his upper body with a serious expression as if to say he was ready to get serious. Without any further explanation, this image quickly surpassed 20 million views. Afterwards, Gill posted a video containing a dramatic line, “It’s going to be a busy few weeks ahead, brother.”

Originally from Massachusetts, USA, he worked at a startup developing corporate analysis software for individual investors from 2010 to 2014, then moved to a regional insurance company called Massachusetts Mutual in 2019, where he was in charge of marketing. Gill began investing in GameStop in June 2019, when the stock price was around $5. He shared his reasoning on the social networking service Reddit’s stock discussion forum ‘WallStreetBets,’ suggesting that GameStop had the potential to attract new customers based on the latest game consoles and encouraged investment.

He then led the buying momentum of retail investors through his YouTube channel (Roaring Kitty), launched the following summer, waging a war against hedge funds that pessimistically evaluated GameStop’s corporate outlook and engaged in short selling. During this process, institutional investors lined up to secure shares again for short covering (buying back shares to close short positions), causing the stock to surge once more. This event, known as the ‘retail investor rebellion,’ saw GameStop’s stock price soar to an intraday high of $120.75 in January 2021, inflicting heavy losses on hedge funds that had bet against the stock. Melvin Capital, which suffered billions of dollars in losses and closed the following year, is a representative example. Additionally, as the rapid fluctuations in GameStop’s stock price caused turmoil in the stock market, institutional investors were left alone while online trading platform Robinhood restricted individual traders’ transactions, leading to lawsuits from users and summons to U.S. House hearings.

On Wall Street, there is analysis that with his return, the ‘GameStop incident’ that heated up the New York stock market in 2021, driven by the meme stock craze, may be reignited.