There’s always a Massachusetts connection – or so it seems.
In the case of the latest bizarre, unexpected phenomenon dominating the news cycle – a market march to lift GameStop shares to the moon, as many traders say – this is true.
The man behind the rise of Reddit users rallying against hedge funds investing millions of dollars in GameStop’s downfall with shortened 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 out about the past week of financial chaos he started.
“I did not expect that,” he told the WSJ. “This story is so much bigger than me.”
The GameStop mania has a history since June 2019 when the 34-year-old began posting his investment activity in GameStop on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, reports WSJ.
In short, Gill invested in GameStop because he believed that there is a long lifespan in the company as a new generation of consoles is on the horizon along with new games. Billion-dollar hedge funds thought exactly the opposite and waited for GameStop’s terms to fail and short the shares.
It turns out that Gill was right and the hedge funds were wrong.
Gill recently posted a screenshot showing a $ 20 million profit on its GameStop shares. And the rest was history. Literally. The result was that veteran financial experts could not really understand or explain.
Hordes of Reddit users flock to investment programs like Robinhood to quickly buy shares of GameStop, which has seen its stock rise more than 255% this week. At the beginning of the year, the stock traded around $ 18 per share. It’s now over $ 330.
Hedge funds such as Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital have lost billions of dollars. And there is a growing army of ‘ordinary people’ trading as a way to return to huge hedge funds that have apparently been manipulating a market to their advantage for a year, the traders say.
The stock gained so much interest on Thursday that trading platforms such as Robinhood and Fidelity halted trading in GameStop and a dozen other retail stocks included in the investment phenomenon. After receiving a lot of critical feedback from both traders and politicians (including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several Republics), Robinhood again instituted limited buying of the options on Friday morning.
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a statement on Friday that it will act to protect retail investors when the facts show abuse or manipulative trading activity. But so far there have been no real allegations of manipulation. Gill told the WSJ that he had not heard from the SEC either.
Gill told the WSJ: “People were quick to say GameStop was the next Blockbuster,” he said. ‘It seems that many people have not dug deeper. It was a gross misrepresentation of the occasion. ‘
Its YouTube channel “RoaringKitty” has attracted hundreds of thousands of Reddit users to share their investing experience with the GameStop app. Many have already told stories of incredible profits and the repayment of bills that they could not do before.
Mrs. Gill told the WSJ her son is always interested in money growing up.
“He would get money from the scratch cards that people did not know they would win. “People would throw them on the ground … Many times there was still money left,” she told the newspaper.
According to the WSJ, its brokerage account held $ 33 million after Thursday’s market, including GameStop shares.
The YouTuber and investor studied at Stonehill College in 2009 and now lives in New Hampshire. Before making his astronomical profit with GameStop shares, he worked on marketing for MassMutual, but he now sees continued work on his YouTube channel and the purchase of a home in his future, the newspaper reported.
A former high school and college runner, Gill told the WSJ that he has always had a dream of building an indoor track facility or a field house in Brockton.
“And now it looks like I could do it,” he told the newspaper.
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