Yahoo FinanceRoaring Kitty’s GameStop return is playing out like an uninspired Hollywood sequel with no real villain and an absent hero

When Keith Gill—aka Roaring Kitty—burst onto the GameStop scene over three years ago to lead an army of Reddit users against hedge fund billionaires on Wall Street, the captivating underdog story left audiences wanting more.
Eight months after his story was immortalized on the silver screen, his sudden return now threatens to play out like a bad Hollywood sequel—banking on nostalgia while lacking any of the original drama and heroism the second time around. Worse, there’s no real villain to fill the shoes of Citadel’s Ken Griffin—and now the main protagonist has gone missing.
Without a narrative compelling enough to go viral, the chances that Gill can marshal his scattered forces and send GameStop shares to the moon again appear to be between slim and none.
“I don’t know what the new story is for this company that would in any way justify the $9 billion valuation,” argues Derek Horstmeyer, a professor of finance at George Mason University’s School of Business in Virginia. “And Gill didn’t seem to be able to articulate what that would be either.”
waiting for Roaring Kitty to post a GameStop PnL screenshot. pic.twitter.com/GGitUlMbKt— wallstreetbets (@wallstreetbets) June 20, 2024
Since euphoria upon Roaring Kitty's reappearance propelled the stock as high as $48 earlier this month, it has relinquished almost all of its gains. Now it’s trading around the $25 mark, only slightly above the $23.14 close before Gill first revealed on June 2 that he owned 5 million shares.
Roaring Kitty a creature of the lockdown-era zeitgeist
At the time GameStop first became a viral phenomenon, the 38-year-old portrayed it as nothing more than a YOLO trade—a kind of "get rich big or die trying" mentality that analyst and podcaster Demetri Kofinas has taken to calling “financial nihilism”.
Gill even claimed his investment decisions can lack any rhyme or reason and simply result from drawing random cards out of an Uno deck he keeps handy while consulting his Magic Eight Ball.
In that sense, Roaring Kitty was truly a creature of the zeitgeist. At the time, asset prices across the board were artificially inflated by a mixture of zero interest rates and quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve. Pandemic-era stimulus checks put found money in the pockets of everyday Americans at a time when gambling on sports was impossible after COVID eliminated spectator events.