GameStop shares jump 30% as trader 'Roaring Kitty' who drove meme craze posts again

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GameStop shares rallied more than 37% in premarket trading Monday after «Roaring Kitty,» the man who inspired the epic short squeeze of 2021, posted online for the first time in roughly three years.

The post, a picture on X of a video gamer leaning forward on their chair as if to indicate he's taking the game seriously, marked Roaring Kitty's first post on the platform — or on Reddit— since 2021.

Roaring Kitty, whose legal name is Keith Gill, is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Gill, who goes by DeepF------Value on Reddit, drew an army of day traders who cheered each other on and piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock, and GameStop call options, between 2020 and 2021.

The "meme stock" frenzy involved individual investors taking aim at short sellers and hedge funds who were pessimistic about the outlook for GameStop and other companies, forcing them to cover their short positions and drive up the price of the target stocks.

The poster child was hedge fund Melvin Capital, which was heavily shorting GameStop and became a target of the army of amateur traders, suffering huge losses that prompted an arm of Ken Griffin's Citadel, as well as Point72, to backstop Melvin's finances with close to $3 billion in support.

The GameStop mania that drove its stock above $120 a share, split-adjusted, in early 2021 from as little as $3 in the space of three months, forced brokerages including Robinhood to limit trading in heavily shorted stocks. In response, one Robinhood user filed a class-action lawsuit following the app's decision to restrict GameStop trading on its platform. The suit was dismissed in August 2023.

Another class-action lawsuit brought against Gill alleged that he