

“The speculation is a rush, plus fighting the man.” A common enemy, so to speak,” said Rod Alzmann, 31, a corporate strategist in Florida who has bet on GameStop for even longer than Mr. Gill’s crew also discovered that hedge funds such as Point72 and Citron Capital were betting that GameStop’s price would fall, in a maneuver known as short-selling. Gill’s investment hit $1 million, according to pictures he posted of his portfolio.

Last August, Ryan Cohen, the founder of the pet food site, announced that he had taken a big stake in GameStop. “What went from a great few hours of stock analysis turned into a few hours of just spreading positivity,” he said. Gill and others online was not just about money. In the comments, he explained that Wall Street did not appreciate how much GameStop would benefit as new video game consoles were released. Gill’s first posts on WallStreetBets showed the screenshot of his E-Trade portfolio with the options trades he had made on GameStop, all of them betting the stock would go up. On YouTube, TikTok and Twitter, he went by Roaring Kitty. The middle letter of the initials of his Reddit username, DFV, refers to an expletive.

Like many other Reddit users, he showed familiarity with memes and internet expressions like YOLO (you only live once) and exhibited a love for profanity. In August 2019, he began posting on Reddit. After graduating, he worked as a chartered financial analyst and a financial wellness educator, a recently deleted LinkedIn profile showed. Before that, he was an All American runner in college who could cover a mile in 4 minutes 3 seconds, according to local newspapers. Gill’s life as Roaring Kitty began in 2014 when he started a limited liability company with that name. “I’m proud,” she said, before hanging up. Gill’s mother, Elaine, confirmed in a brief phone call that her son was Roaring Kitty. His online accounts and email addresses were tied to his old office in New Hampshire and his Massachusetts home. Gill did not respond to requests for comment.
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But with people now stuck at home in the pandemic with easy access to free trading at online brokerages, “these guys saw an opportunity and they took it,” he said. Gill “would have been impossible even a few years ago” because every trade came with a fee and there was less focus on the markets on social media. Larry Tabb, the head of market structure research at Bloomberg Intelligence, said the rise of traders like Mr. Junk Bonds: Firms with low credit ratings, whose debt is often referred to as “junk,” are now taking advantage of a window of opportunity to borrow more cash.Enduring Meme Stocks: The frenzy that saw traders congregate on social media and push stock prices for companies like GameStop higher can no longer be explained as simply a pandemic phenomenon.

What’s a family to do? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but you have options.
