GameStop shares rise 21% — close well off highs — as ‘Roaring Kitty’ posts account with $116 million

Meme stock GameStop rallied again Monday on speculation that Keith Gill, the man who inspired 2021’s epic short squeeze, could have a huge position in the video game retailer.

Shares closed up 21% to $28 a share. It had jumped more than 70% at the open, but closed well off the highs.

Gill, who goes by DeepF——Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube and X, reappeared Sunday night, posting a screenshot of what could be his portfolio holding a significant amount of GameStop common shares and call options.

The Reddit trading crowd’s favorite trader holds 5 million shares of GameStop worth $115.7 million as of Friday’s closing price, according to the account snapshot posted on Reddit’s r/SuperStonk forum. The account also showed a position of 120,000 call options in GameStop with a strike price of $20 that expire on June 21 that were purchased for about $5.68 each. GameStop shares closed Friday at $23.14.

The post was not independently verified by CNBC. Notably, he didn’t post on the infamous WallStreetBets chatroom where he posted all his trade updates at the height of the GameStop mania over three years ago, although the username is the same one used.

Around the same time Sunday night, Gill posted on X a cryptic picture of a reverse card from the game “Uno.”

GameStop shares hit their lows of the session following a late-afternoon report by the Wall Street Journal that Morgan Stanley’s E*Trader broker was considering booting Gill because of concern what he was doing amounted to market manipulation. The WSJ cited people familiar with the matter. E*Trade declined to comment.

Gill’s first return to social media three weeks ago sparked an eye-popping rally in GameStop with shares more than doubling in May alone. At the time, he simply posted a picture of a man in a chair leaning forward, but that was enough to trigger a buying frenzy among amateur traders.

GameStop took advantage of the May rally by raising more than $900 million in a stock sale.

The investor is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. In 2021, through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill encouraged a band of retail traders to squeeze out short selling hedge funds in GameStop.

The action got so wild at one point that brokerages including Robinhood had to restrict trading in the stock as it blew up their clearinghouse margin. The mania also led to a series of congressional hearings, featuring Gill, around brokers’ practices and gamifying retail trading.

GameStop is still struggling with a transition to online gaming away from brick-and-mortar video game purchases, with investors banking on CEO Ryan Cohen to eventually reinvent the company.

— CNBC’s Katrina Bishop contributed to this report.