GameStop location on Sixth Avenue in New York on March 23, 2021.
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Shares of GameStop and AMC jumped more than 50% in premarket trading Tuesday, on track to extend their gains after “Roaring Kitty,” the man at the center of the meme stock craze, went viral for the first time in nearly three years.
Shares of video game retailer GameStop were trading up 50% at 5:55 a.m. ET, while movie theater chain AMC was up more than 53%.
Another called “Meme stock” was poised to open sharply higher on Tuesday. Shares of once-dominant smartphone maker BlackBerry rose 28% in premarket trading, while shares of headphone maker Koss rose 22%.
Market movements follow big gains for stocks at the beginning of the trading week. On Monday, GameStop shares rose a whopping 74.4%, while AMC shares rose 78.4% in the previous trading session.
The phenomenon of stock memes seems to have been reignited by modern social media to update From “Roaring Kitty”. The man, whose legal name is Keith Gill, posted a photo on Platform X of a video gamer sitting forward in his chair — an image players use to indicate they take the game seriously.
It was Jill’s first post on the platform since 2021, and it has since been viewed more than 23 million times. Gil followed up his return to the X platform with a series of posts of short video clips from popular TV shows and movies, although the meaning behind them is unclear.
Jill is the former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. Also known as DeepF——Value on Reddit, it attracted an army of day traders who encouraged each other and piled into traditional video game stocks and into GameStop call options between 2020 and 2021.
— CNBC’s Yun Li and Fred Imbert contributed to this report.
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