The man at the centre of the pandemic meme stock craze appeared online for the first time in three years, sending the prices of the quirky and volatile shares sharply higher on Monday.In this image from video provided by the U.S. House financial services committee, Keith Gill, a GameStop investor known in social media forums as 'Roaring Kitty,' testifies during a virtual hearing on the company in Washington, D.C., in February 2021.
GameStop in 2021 was a video game retailer that was struggling to survive as consumers switched rapidly from discs to digital downloads. Big Wall Street hedge funds and major investors were betting against it, or shorting its stock, believing that its shares would continue on a drastically downward trend.
The small guys won, at least for a while, driving shares of GameStop up more than 1,000 per cent in 2021, and other meme stocks as well. The struggling movie theatre chain AMC jumped 2,300 per cent in a very short span of time in the same year.Some big traders posted colossal losses as GameStop raced from less than $20 US, to close at $400 each. Citron Research, Melvin Capital and other well-known hedge funds lost an estimated $5 billion, according to analytics firm S3 Partners.
Shares of GameStop Corp., which have faded steadily since 2021, had already risen 57 per cent this month. In January, GameStop reported its first annual profit since 2018, although it's still unclear if Cohen's turnaround plan will succeed.The dynamics of the market as far as companies like GameStop are concerned have changed, however.