Wilmington Man Drove Gamestop Stock Craze: Report

WILMINGTON, MA — The YouTube and Reddit user who was in large part responsible for the recent Gamestop stock craze is a Wilmington father and former MassMutual employee, the Wall Street Journal reported in an interview with him Friday.

Keith Gill, 34, is known on YouTube as Roaring Kitty and on Reddit by the expletive-laced handle DeepF-------Value. Wilmington Patch has reached out to Gill for comment and will update this story when we hear back from him.

Until recently, Gill worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. He has a 2-year-old daughter and films his popular YouTube cases for the stock from his Wilmington basement so as to not wake her up, the Journal reported.

As of Thursday, Gill had posted a $33 million total gain on his bet on the video game retailer, although he was down nearly $15 million overnight on the stock's wild volatility this week.

Gill grew up in Brockton, where he was a competitive distance runner in high school. He studied accounting at Stonehill College, worked in New Hampshire for several years, became a Certified Financial Analyst, and began working for MassMutual in 2019, the Journal reported.

Gill began investing in the stock in June 2019, when it was valued under $6 per share. It closed at $197.44 Thursday — and Gill was still holding on to his bets. The price fluctuated in the single digits for more than a year after Gill got in, began rising around Aug. 2020 and then went on a meteoric rise beginning in mid-Jan.

That rise, egged on by Gill and other users of the Reddit forum /r/WallStreetBets, has caused massive losses for hedge funds who were betting against the gaming retailer, led to massive market volatility and even resulted in many retail brokerages halting trading in the stock entirely on Wednesday. The volatility, and the actions by brokerages like Robinhood, has drawn scrutiny from Congress.

Gill has always insisted that, as his Reddit handle suggests, he believes that Gamestop is in a better position that the hedge funds betting against it believed.

“People were doing a quick take, saying GameStop was the next Blockbuster, ” he told the Journal. “It appeared many folks just weren’t digging in deeper. It was a gross misclassification of the opportunity.”

In an Aug. 2020 Youtube Video, Gill laid out his case that the stock could go to $50 — which it did last week.

"Many people think it's a failing investment, but everyone's wrong," Gill said. "Gamestop maintains a healthy market share within the gaming industry."

He argued that while physical discs are on the decline as a portion of video game sales, replaced with digital downloads, that decline is not happening quickly as many think, and the company is using that time to pivot to "live experiential concepts" like E-Sports.

Gill and other online Gamestop fans were particularly enthusiastic about the company's prospects following a major investment in Sept. 2020 by Ryan Cohen, the co-founder of the pet supply e-commerce copmany Chewy.

Gill's case for the stock was also technical.

"Gamestop is by far the most heavily shorted stock in the market," he said.

A short sale is a way to bet that a stock's price will decline, by borrowing a share, selling it, and hoping that when the loan term is up, you can buy a share at a lower price, pocketing the difference. But if the price rises instead, short sellers end up having to quickly buy shares to staunch their losses — increasing demand and thus pushing prices up even further.

This happened to several multi-billion dollar hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, which lost over 30 percent on its bet against the company in the last month and said it closed its position. Short sellers have reportedly lost $70 billion this year on bets against Gamestop and other companies that have become popular online, like AMC theaters.

This "short squeeze," plus a "gamma squeeze" involving bets on the price going up, contributed to the stocks runaway price increase over the past week, although in recent days the price has fluctuated wildly.

"An upward move could be explosive, maybe," Gill said in his Aug. 2020 video. "What the hell do we know."

Gill told the Journal that he'd like to build an indoor track facility in Brockton, with his earnings.

Christopher Huffaker can be reached at 412-265-8353 or [email protected].