How a Reddit User and His Friends Helped Fuel the GameStop Frenzy (original) (raw)

Technology|The ‘Roaring Kitty’ Rally: How a Reddit User and His Friends Roiled the Markets

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/technology/roaring-kitty-reddit-gamestop-markets.html

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The ‘Roaring Kitty’ Rally: How a Reddit User and His Friends Roiled the Markets

A Massachusetts man who goes by “Roaring Kitty” on social media helped fuel the frenzy around GameStop. His 53,000investmentinthecompanybrieflyreached53,000 investment in the company briefly reached 53,000investmentinthecompanybrieflyreached48 million in value.

Credit...Max-o-matic

Jan. 29, 2021

In mid-2019, a Reddit user — known as “Roaring Kitty” on some social media accounts — posted a picture on an online forum depicting a single $53,000 investment in the video-game retailer GameStop.

The post attracted little attention, except from a few people who mocked the bet on the struggling company. “This dude should sell now,” a Reddit user named cmcewen wrote at the time.

But Roaring Kitty was not deterred. Over the next year, he began tweeting frequently about GameStop and making YouTube and TikTok videos about his investment. He also started livestreaming his financial ideas. Other Reddit users with monikers like Ackilles and Bowlerguy92 began following his every move and piling into GameStop.

“IF HE IS IN WE ARE IN💎💎💎,” one user wrote on a Reddit board called WallStreetBets on Tuesday.

Roaring Kitty — who is Keith Gill, 34, a former financial educator for an insurance firm in Massachusetts — has now become a central figure in this week’s stock market frenzy. Inspired by him and a small crew of individual investors who gathered around him, hordes of young online traders took GameStop’s stock on a wild ride, pitting themselves against sophisticated hedge funds and upending Wall Street’s norms in the process.

Their actions — pushing up GameStop’s price by buying so-called options contracts that offer a cheap way to bet on a stock’s direction — have shocked established investors because Mr. Gill and his online comrades are the antithesis of the Wall Street titans who have long ruled the stock market.

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A screenshot of Keith Gill from his Roaring Kitty’s YouTube channel.Credit...via YouTube

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