A 34 year old insurance educator from Massachusetts invested $53,000 into a dying video game store that nobody wanted. Wall Street laughed. Then it turned into $48 MILLION and he brought the entire hedge fund industry to its knees.
– Keith Gill worked a regular 9 to 5 job at MassMutual insurance in Massachusetts.
– He spent his evenings posting stock analysis videos on YouTube under the name Roaring Kitty. He had almost no viewers.
– In 2019 he invested $53,000 into GameStop.
– A struggling mall video game store that every Wall Street hedge fund was betting against.
– They were so confident it would fail they had shorted the stock meaning they had borrowed and sold shares expecting to buy them back cheaper when the price collapsed.
– Gill posted his analysis on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum.
– Argued GameStop was undervalued and the hedge funds were wrong. Most people ignored him.
– Then ordinary people started reading his posts. Retail investors with $500 and $1,000 accounts started buying GameStop shares in their thousands.
– In January 2021 GameStop stock went from $3 to $483 in three weeks. A 16,000 percent increase.
– The hedge funds that had shorted the stock were now in a catastrophic position.
– As the price rose they were being forced to buy back shares at prices they never imagined. Melvin Capital lost $6.8 BILLION in a single month.
– Robinhood and other brokers under pressure from Wall Street suddenly restricted ordinary people from buying GameStop while letting institutions sell freely. The internet exploded.
– Gill was called to testify before the United States Congress.
– He sat in front of the entire House Financial Services Committee in a headband and said: "I am not a cat. I am not a hedge fund. I like the stock."
– His $53,000 had turned into $48 MILLION at its peak.
– He quietly posted his final Reddit update in April 2021 showing a profit of nearly $20 MILLION. Then disappeared completely from the internet.
– A Hollywood film called Dumb Money was made about him in 2023 starring Paul Dano.
– He has given no interviews. Made no public appearances. Nobody knows exactly what he did with the money.
A regular guy with $53,000 and a YouTube channel no one watched turned a dying mall store into a weapon that wiped $6.8 BILLION from a hedge fund in one month.