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There’s still a connection to Massachusetts – at least it seems.
In the case of the latest bizarre and unexpected phenomenon dominating the news cycle – a market rally to raise GameStop stock to the moon, as many traders say – it’s true.
The man behind the wave of Reddit users rallying to hedge funds betting millions of dollars in GameStop’s demise with short stocks is from Brockton, Massachusetts.
His name is Keith Gill and his parents, Elaine and Stephen, still live in the City of Champions.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gill spoke about the financial chaos he started last week.
“I didn’t expect this,” he told the WSJ. “This story is so much bigger than me.”
The GameStop mania dates back to June 2019, when the 34-year-old started posting his GameStop investing activity on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, WSJ reports.
In short, Gill invested in GameStop because he believed there was an interesting longevity in the business as a new generation of consoles was on the horizon, along with new games. Billion-worth hedge funds have thought the exact opposite and are betting on stocks that are failed and sold by GameStop.
It turned out that Gill was right and the hedge funds were wrong.
Gill recently posted a screenshot showing a $ 20 million gain on his GameStop shares. And the rest was history. Literally. The resulting result has been that seasoned financial experts cannot really understand or explain.
Hordes of Reddit users have flocked to investing apps like Robinhood to quickly buy GameStop stock, causing stocks to rise more than 255% this week. For context, at the start of the year, the stock was trading around $ 18 a share. It’s now hovering around over $ 330.
Hedge funds like Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital have lost billions of dollars. And there is a growing army of “ordinary people” who are turning to trading as a way to get rid of huge hedge funds that have seemingly “manipulated the market” for their benefit for years without penalty, traders say.
The action sparked such interest on Thursday that trading platforms such as Robinhood and Fidelity halted trading in GameStop and a dozen other retailer stocks that are included in the investing phenomenon. But after receiving a swarm of critical comments from traders and politicians (including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several Republicans), Robinhood reinstated limited options buying on Friday morning.
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a statement Friday saying it “will act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abuse or manipulative business activity.” But so far there have been no real allegations of manipulation. Gill told the WSJ he hadn’t heard of the SEC either.
Gill told the WSJ, “People were taking a quick take, saying GameStop was the next blockbuster,” he said. “It seemed like a lot of people just weren’t digging deeper. It was a serious misclassification of the opportunity.
His YouTube channel “RoaringKitty” has drawn hundreds of thousands of Reddit users to share their investing experience with the GameStop app. Many have shared stories of incredible earnings and bill paying that they were previously unable to make.
Ms Gill told the WSJ that her son was still interested in money growing up.
“He was making money with those scratch tickets that people didn’t know they won. People threw them on the ground… Often there was still money on them, ”she told the newspaper.
According to the WSJ, after the market closed on Thursday, his brokerage account held $ 33 million, including GameStop stock.
The YouTuber and Investor graduated from Stonehill College in 2009 and now live in New Hampshire. Before making his astronomical earnings with the GameStop action, he worked in marketing for MassMutual, but now sees continued work on his YouTube channel and buying a home in his future, the newspaper reports.
A former high school and college long-distance runner, Gill told the WSJ he always dreamed of building an athletic track or country house in Brockton.
“And now it looks like I could do it,” he told the newspaper.
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