GameStop stock skyrocketed more than 100% on Monday before giving back just some of those huge gains, the latest meme stock rally fueled by the investor and social media personality known as “Roaring Kitty.”
Shares of the video game retailer were still up a whopping 88% in pre-market trading Monday morning after rising 103%. The latest surge came after Keith Gill, better known by his social media persona Roaring Kitty, posted a screenshot Sunday night on Reddit suggesting he has a huge portfolio of GameStop stock and options. The screenshot suggested that he owns 5 million GameStop shares, which would have been worth almost $116 million as of Friday’s closing price of $23.14 per share. Gill goes by “DeepF———Value” on Reddit, and by Roaring Kitty on X and YouTube. He later posted a picture of the reverse card from the card game “Uno” on X.
GameStop stock was all the way up to $43.57 per share at about 7:15 a.m. on Monday.
The company said last month that it sold 45 million shares of common stock for approximately $933.4 million. It had disclosed that it would be carrying out an “at-the-market” equity offering, meaning that its newly issued shares were sold at market prices. At the time, GameStop warned that investors who purchase shares in the offering could lose a “significant portion” of their investments due to the stock’s “extreme price fluctuations.”
The company also disclosed in regulatory filings that it’s projecting quarterly sales to drop to $872-$892 million, down from $1.24 billion in the same quarter last year. GameStop also projected net losses between $27 million to $37 million for the quarter, an improvement from $50.5 million in losses a year earlier.
GameStop’s shares have been on a wild ride in recent weeks. After Gill made a cryptic post on X that fans interpreted as a sign to begin trading GameStop stock again, the company’s shares closed nearly 75% higher the next day. AMC and a handful of other stocks also caught the tailwinds of the renewed meme stock frenzy.
Meme stocks are company shares that become wildly popular online and are hotly traded by investors, most of them are individual rather than institutional, causing a surge in share price regardless of the company’s actual performance. (They also pose a massive headache for hedge funds and other short-sellers, who make money by betting against stocks.)
Gill led the early 2021 meme stock rally, which sent GameStop’s shares skyrocketing 1,000% in a matter of weeks. The response this time around, however, was shorter-lived and more muted, with shares beginning to sink just days after Gill’s initial post.
–Rocio Fabbro contributed to this article.
This article originally appeared on Quartz.
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