GameStop stock rose 13.3 percent on Monday after Keith Gill, the popular online merchant behind last month’s frantic rally, announced he had doubled his investment in the struggling retailer.
Shares of GameStop opened at $ 46.8 on Monday and even closed at $ 46. GameStop closed at $ 40.68 per share on Friday. Gill announced on Reddit after the market closed on Friday that he had bought an additional 50,000 shares of the company to bring his total investment to 100,000 shares.
Gill, a Massachusetts financial advisor better known on Reddit as ‘deepf — ngvalue’ or YouTube as ‘RoaringKitty’, is widely credited with planting the seed that grew into a massive rally in GameStop stock. The company’s stock price rose about 1,800 percent in January, reaching a peak of $ 483 last month before collapsing.
Gill told a House panel on Thursday that his early Reddit posts advocating for investment in GameStop were nothing more than an attempt to share a potential opportunity with other amateur traders that got out of hand. Critics of the GameStop rally say Gill and other prominent Reddit users may be guilty of market manipulation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced last month that it is investigating possible manipulative practices surrounding the GameStop frenzy, but securities attorneys say the public nature of the meeting makes it difficult to argue a conspiracy.