There’s always a connection to Massachusetts – or so it seems.
In the case of the most recent bizarre and unexpected phenomenon that dominates the news cycle – a market boom to bring GameStop shares to the moon, as many traders are saying – it is true.
The man behind the wave of Reddit users battling millions of dollars of hedge funds betting GameStop’s death on short shares is from Brockton, Massachusetts.
Her name is Keith Gill and her parents, Elaine and Stephen, still live in the City of Champions.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gill talked about the financial chaos that started last week.
“I didn’t expect this,” he told WSJ. “This story is much bigger than me.”
GameStop mania has a history that dates back to June 2019, when the 34-year-old started posting his investment activity on GameStop on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, reports the WSJ.
In short, Gill invested in GameStop because he believed it was worth the longevity at the company, as a new generation of consoles was on the horizon, along with new games. Billion-dollar hedge funds thought the exact opposite and bet on the collapse and sale of GameStop shares.
It turns out that Gill was right and the hedge funds wrong – big time.
Gill recently posted a screenshot that showed a $ 20 million gain on his GameStop shares. And the rest was history. Literally. The result that followed was a veteran financial expert who cannot understand or explain.
Hordes of Reddit users flocked to investment apps like Robinhood to quickly buy GameStop shares, causing shares to rise more than 255% this week. For contextual purposes, at the beginning of the year the stock was trading at around $ 18 per share. It is now hovering around $ 330.
Hedge funds like Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital lost billions of dollars. And there is a growing army of “normal people” turning to trade as a way to get back at the huge hedge funds that apparently “manipulated the market” for their benefit for years without penalty, traders say.
The shares were taking such high interest on Thursday that trading platforms like Robinhood and Fidelity disrupted the GameStop trade and a dozen other retailer stocks that are included in the investment phenomenon. But after receiving a swarm of critical feedback from traders and politicians (including MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several Republicans), Robinhood reinstated limited purchase of options again on Friday morning.
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a statement on Friday saying it “will act to protect retail investors when the facts show abuse or manipulative business activity”. But so far there have been no real claims of manipulation. Gill told WSJ that he had not heard from the SEC either.
Gill told WSJ: “People were doing a quick assessment, saying GameStop would be the next Blockbuster,” he said. “It seemed like a lot of people just weren’t digging any deeper. It was a gross error in classifying the opportunity. “
Its YouTube channel “RoaringKitty” attracted hundreds of thousands of Reddit users to share their investment experience with the GameStop app. Many shared stories of incredible earnings and bill payments that they previously couldn’t.
Mrs. Gill told WSJ that her son had always been interested in money while growing up.
“He would make money from scratch cards that people didn’t know they had won. People threw them on the floor … There was often money still with them, ”she told the newspaper.
According to the WSJ, after Thursday’s market closed, its brokerage account held $ 33 million, including GameStop shares.
YouTuber and the investor graduated from Stonehill College in 2009 and now live in New Hampshire. Before reaching his astronomical earnings from GameStop shares, he worked in marketing for MassMutual, but now sees continued work on his YouTube channel and the purchase of a home in the future, reports the newspaper.
A former high school and college long-distance runner, Gill told WSJ that he had always dreamed of building a covered race track or country house in Brockton.
“And now, it looks like I could really do that,” he told the newspaper.
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