‘Roaring Kitty’ return drives fresh GameStop share surge

The June 2 screenshot posted by Keith Gill, who goes by a profane handle involving the phrase “Deep Value” on Reddit, shows a stake of five million shares with an average cost basis of $21.27 apiece.

A position that large would make Mr Gill one of the ­company’s five biggest investors and is more than six times the number of shares his account showed in an April 2021 post, the last time it was active on Reddit, when accounting for a four-for-one stock split.

The screenshot, which also included 120,000 call options worth $65.7m due to expire on June 21, couldn’t be verified. The options would allow him to buy the stock at $20 a share, but would cost him some $240m to exercise.

Doing so would add 12 million shares to Mr Gill’s position. That would make him the fourth-largest shareholder, data compiled by Bloomberg shows.

The post is the account’s first in more than three years, mirroring a return for Mr Gill’s X account just last month. The reappearance of his ‘Roaring Kitty’ handle on social-media platform X jumpstarted a 271pc two-day surge that was quickly reversed as the mania failed to retain investor interest.

On Monday, GameStop shares rose as much as 105pc in pre-market trading before paring the advance to roughly 79pc.

If pre-market gains hold, the stock would be set to add about $6.3bn to its market capitalisation.

On X, Mr Gill also posted an image of a reverse card from the game Uno that indicates a player is changing the card-pickup direction. The post had attracted 6.5 million views in the 12 hours since its publication at about 8pm on Sunday New York time. Before Roaring Kitty’s return to X, Mr Gill had been silent across social media platforms including Reddit and YouTube for more than three years.

The first X post on May 12 with an image of a video gamer leaning in, fuelled anticipation he’d make a swift return to the market and drove shares to more than triple in days.

In turn, GameStop capitalised on the stock’s jump, selling 45 million shares to raise roughly $933m in a move that many industry watchers perceived as prudent while diluting the very investors that piled into the stock.