GameStop and AMC plummet as the roaring Kitty Meme stock craze fades

The resurgence of the magic meme stock craze appears to be fading away at GameStop and AMC.

GameStock (GME) was trading 15% below its Wednesday afternoon close just before the market opened on Thursday. After the bell, shares fell 18% to $31.91 before rebounding.

As of this writing, GameStop stock is trading at $33.38, down 16% from its previous close.

Meanwhile, AMC isn’t doing much better. Shares of the movie theater chain opened trading 8% lower than Wednesday’s close as U.S. markets opened.

The name meme stocks comes from the fact that the stock prices of GME and AMC are heavily influenced by social media. In this case, I am specifically referring to stock influencer Keith Gill. Twitter She is active on YouTube as Roaring Kitty and on Reddit as DeepFuckingValue. In 2021, he featured prominently in the GameStop short squeeze. However, for the past three years, all of his social media accounts have been silent.

He appears to be back, but there is some skepticism surrounding it. So far, his return has only come in the form of images and videos posted on Twitter without much explanation. Latest: An edited clip from the 1994 Academy Award-winning film “The Shawshank Redemption.”

The latest tweets are slightly less cryptic than the older ones. The screenplay is rewritten using text overlays, so Andy Defresne’s daring prison escape instead references “Old Kitty” and the muddy Reddit posts, bundles of tweets and old live streams left behind after he disappeared from social media. In 2021.

The reemergence of Roaring Kitty has made GameStop and AMC stock prices incredibly volatile. Over the past four days, Nasdaq’s volatility circuit breaker has automatically halted GME trading 32 times and AMC trading 26 times, according to NasdaqTrader.

All this volatility has benefited a few traders. Just yesterday, a whale bought $908,000 worth of April GME options and sold them for a $44 million profit. And at least one hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, acquired more than 1 million shares of GME stock ahead of this week’s rally.

Robinhood, a US-based stock and cryptocurrency trading app, recorded $5 billion worth of trades in one day, making it “one of the biggest days in the last 12 months.” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said: on twitter. For reference, the company recorded an average of $2.7 billion in transactions per day in March.

Editor: Andrew Hayward