Roaring Kitty is back [existential sigh]

The surprising lack of post-fame grift or attention vampirism has been one of the most admirable aspects of Keith Patrick Gill.

Rather than cash in on his day-trader divinity by selling trading strategies, health supplements or cat food, he went utterly silent three years ago. No Met Gala, no CNBC, no nothing. He wouldn’t even do Lunch with the FT. He became the Bill Watterson of the meme stock moment, with not even a peep on social media.

Until now.

Look, early 2021 was wildly amusing for financial dorks like FT Alphaville. As Ken Griffin noted at the time, “the fact that the tweet of an ice cream cone can move markets will be the subject of academic study for years”. We even liked the subsequent movie, even if we had some issues with all the conspiracy theory nonsense.

But we were hoping to ignore Keith Gill/Roaring Kitty/DeepFuckingValue’s return. There’s a time and a place etc, and the time and place for writing up oblique social media posts by meme stonk overlords was very much early 2021.

But the market clearly wished otherwise. This is sadly hard to ignore.

At pixel time that is an 84.17 per cent jump for GME. Over at Reddit’s WallStreetBets, the reactions were as measured as you’d expect:

These days most of the GameStop “action” actually happens on two separate forums, r/Superstonk and r/GME, where the reaction was . . . less measured.

Roaring Kitty has even managed to send a spasm of life through GME-adjacent meme stocks like AMC. which is up almost 18 per cent at pixel.

and even BlackBerry:

and Koss.

However, for every Godfather 2 or Empire Strikes Back, there’s a Highlander 2: The Quickening or Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. This sequel is probably going to suck.