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“Roaring Kitty” is back and louder than ever.
After a three-year catnap, Keith Gill, the investor widely known as “Roaring Kitty,” made a post to X on Sunday that kicked off a renewed meme stock frenzy around GameStop stock.
Gill gained national attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for his bullish analysis of GameStop on Reddit, and drove the first short-squeeze of the video game retailer’s stock in early 2021, which saw its shares surge more than 1,000% in a matter of weeks.
Shares of GameStop soared once again on Monday following Gill’s apparent return, closing out the trading day up almost 75%. And on Tuesday morning, its stock surged a whopping 120% in pre-market trading, and traded 62% higher at market open before being paused.
This frenzy has also helped send other meme stocks higher, with AMC Entertainment rising 78%. And popular memecoins Dogecoin and Shiba Inu jumped more than 6% and about 5%, respectively. Meme stocks refer to company shares that become wildly popular online and are traded feverishly by retail and individual investors, sending prices soaring regardless of the company’s actual operating results or prospects.
Meme stocks have been a thorn in the side of short-sellers — traders who bet that stocks will fall by borrowing shares and selling them high with the belief that they can be repurchased later at a lower cost — because they send share prices soaring, costing these investors money.
The 37-year-old retail investor has posted about a dozen videos and gifs from popular movies to his X account — which received millions of views each — in the last 24 hours. Gill’s return has also sparked excitement about the end of his hiatus and the potential for a new meme stock renaissance.
Here’s what to know about Roaring Kitty.
The man behind Roaring Kitty
Gill gained notoriety through his Roaring Kitty social media persona, which he started on X, then Twitter, in November 2014, as well as on his YouTube channel by the same name, which now has more 600,000 subscribers. In 2019, he started his Reddit page, “DeepF***ingValue,” where he began posting about GameStop on r/WallStreetBets.
He has become an icon within the meme stock community, and a relatively private figure, with no LinkedIn account or other public social media presence under his own name. Prior to his celebrity, Gill was an analyst at insurance firm MassMutual. Reuters reported that his last day of employment at the firm was Jan. 28, 2021, at the height of the first GameStop squeeze.
As of a 2021 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gill resided in Brockton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Caroline. Online records show he resides in Wilmington, Massachusetts.
Scrutiny and hiatus
In February 2021, Gill and his former employer MassMutual were the subject of a lawsuit filed by a GameStop investor, who alleged Gill caused him and others “huge losses” and violated securities laws. Gill argued that he made it clear his YouTube channel was “for educational purposes only” and that he didn’t use social media to promote the stock.
The lawsuit, which was later dismissed, came just one day before Gill was slated to testify before Congress about the so-called “Reddit rally.”
MassMutual was ordered to pay a $4 million fine as part of a settlement with Massachusetts regulators, over claims that the insurer failed to adequately supervise Gill’s and other investors’ online and trading activity in relation to his “Roaring Kitty” persona.
The whirlwind of commotion — legal, regulatory, and financial — that resulted from GameStop’s historic surge drove Gill into his hiatus by mid-2021.
Dumb Money
Gill was the subject of the 2021 book The Antisocial Network, about the GameStop squeeze, which was adapted into a movie last year, titled Dumb Money. Paul Dano played Gill in the film, which also featured big names including America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Pete Davidson.
The movie depicts him as a bandana-wearing, Belgian beer-drinking amateur investor who managed his social media presence and stock moves from the basement of his Massachusetts home.