Meme stock GameStop rallied again in premarket trading Friday on speculation Keith Gill, the man who inspired the 2021 epic short squeeze, could have a large position in video game retailers.
Shares in pre-market trading were 80% higher at 4:50 a.m. ET, after rising 90% earlier in the morning. It comes after stocks jumped on Sunday evening’s 24-hour Robinhood exchange, which allows certain stocks to trade continuously.
Gill, who goes by DeepF—— Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube and X, resurfaced late Sunday night, posting an image of what could be a portfolio holding GameStop common stock and phone options.
Reddit’s favorite trader traded 5 million shares of GameStop worth $115.7 million at Friday’s closing price, according to an account snapshot posted on the Reddit r/SuperStonk forum. The account also shows a position of 120,000 call options on GameStop with a strike price of $20 expiring on June 21 that they bought for about $5.68 each. GameStop shares closed at $23.14.
The post was not independently verified by CNBC. Notably, he did not post in the famous WallStreetBets chatroom where he posted all trade updates at the height of the GameStop mania over the past three years, even though the username was the same.
Around the same Sunday night, Gill posted a faint image of a reverse card in the game “Uno” on X, which quickly gained 30,000 likes.
Gill’s first return to social media three weeks ago sparked a rally in GameStop with its stock more than doubling in May. At the time, he only posted a picture of a man in a chair leaning forward, but it 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.
GameStop, YTD
The investor is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. In 2021, through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill encouraged a group of retail traders to launch a hedge fund that sold short GameStop.
The action got so wild at one point that brokerages including Robinhood had to limit trading in the stock as it blew up clearinghouse margins. Mania also led to several congressional hearings, featuring Gill, on brokerage practices and retail trading.
GameStop is still struggling with the transition to online gaming away from buying brick-and-mortar video games with investor banking CEO Ryan Cohen finally reinventing the company.
– CNBC’s Katrina Bishop contributed to this report.
