GameStop $GME and other meme stocks surged wildly on Monday morning as Keith Gill returned to social media. The leader of the 2021 meme-stock mania, also known as Roaring Kitty and Deep Fucking Value, sent a single tweet on Sunday night that shook the universe of meme stocks, as their fearless leader signaled a second coming.
The tweet from Gill, which depicted a man leaning forward with a video game controller, is the first post from Roaring Kitty’s Twitter $TWTR account in nearly three years. A lot has changed since 2021, including a feature film being created about this once-niche subcommunity that starred Seth Rogen. Some familiar companies’ stocks are surging in price on Monday alongside a new crop of meme stocks, including Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Reddit $RDDT itself.
GameStop’s stock was halted for volatility five times and climbed as high as 110% on Monday morning. As of 11 am ET, familiar meme stock and theatre chain AMC rose roughly 24%, while Trump Media rose 8%, Robinhood rose 6%, and Reddit itself jumped by 12%.
As Bloomberg reports, Gill is probably calling out the relatively high percentage of short sellers interested in GameStop at the moment. Roughly 24% of available shares are sold short, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners. That’s generally considered high, but it’s far lower than the short seller interest that preceded the 2021 GameStop mania.
Over on the subreddit where 2021’s mania originated, r/wallstreetbets, the channel took notice of Gill’s return. A repost of Roaring Kitty’s tweet received 25,000 upvotes. However, a moderator commented that r/wallstreetbets would remove most posts related to Gamestop in the subreddit, noting that the community has moved on to other meme stocks.
“We’re gonna remove most GME posts on WSB that aren’t major happenings like this,” said the moderator. “We’re about gains and losses, YOLO posts, things that aren’t open-ended and open to having people sitting around for years. We’re not trying to judge you too harshly if you are, but that’s not what we did here before GME and that’s not what we’re doing now.”
Before Reddit went public in March, the company warned in its S-1 form that one of the possible risks to investing in the company is r/wallstreetbets. The social media company warned that RDDT could become a meme stock, just like GameStop and AMC. The company made great efforts to appease its community members, including by reserving a portion of its shares for longtime Redditors.
Despite its real value as a social media stock, perhaps Reddit was always destined to be a meme stock because of r/wallstreetbets. At least, it certainly seems to be moving that way on Monday morning.