Is it really you, Keith Gill? (And does it even matter anymore?)

The activity on the Roaring Kitty’s Twitter account has come and gone — and they’re not answering my DMs. Phone numbers previously linked to Keith Gill are either disconnected or have moved on to other owners. His lawyers and relatives are “no comment”-ing the press.

Through the past couple weeks, I’ve wrestled over whether to attribute the social media activity that sparked gains of more than 250% in GameStop and AMC Entertainment (followed by a sharp reversal of most of those advances) to “Keith Gill” or “a Twitter account associated with Keith Gill” — because right now, we just don’t know for sure. But let’s run through a few things we do know.

Keith Gill did not cash out of GameStop at the top in late January 2021, nor immediately after his Congressional testimony. In fact, he increased his position in GameStop from 150,000 to 200,000 shares between February 19 and April 16, 2021, the date of his “final update” on the wallstreetbets subreddit. Diamond hands! (If he maintained those holdings from April 16, 2021, that brokerage account would be worth roughly $12.5 million by the end of April 30, 2024, down from nearly $31 million).

Let’s focus in on a key date: April 22, 2024. That’s the day the price of GameStop’s stock also sank to $10.01, its lowest level since January 2021 (adjusted for splits).

It also appears to be the day when the last lawsuit in which Keith Gill is named as a defendant was dismissed.

A few days later, demand began accelerating for short-term call options that would benefit from another mania in GameStop. Less than two weeks later, we saw trading volumes in the stock pick up. Around that time, the Roaring Kitty account liked a tweet that featured an image from the movie “Run Lola Run.” 

Then, on Sunday, May 12, the account tweeted the now-infamous meme of someone leaning forward in a chair — and then tweeted a lot more while the stock spiked and also while the rally mostly fizzled out.

There’s been some debate over whether the tweets coming from the account are actually Gill; one report that the account was sold has been largely discredited.

For what it’s worth, we have some evidence from 2020 that Keith Gill has the necessary A/V chops for video memes of this nature. Some of the meme source material (granted, from uber-popular shows like “Seinfeld” and “Game of Thrones”) matches gifs that Keith Gill posted on Reddit back in 2020 and 2021. And music tracks used in the videos are credited the same fashion as videos posted from Roaring Kitty in 2021.

Thanks to some incredible sleuthing by Redditors, there’s a case to be made that what we saw from @TheRoaringKitty’s account was an elaborate recounting of his life story over the past three years and change – and meant to be watched in reverse.

If true, that may give an extra layer of meaning to the May 12 tweet that started it all.

That same image (albeit with a color difference) was tweeted days earlier by @MrZackMorris on X (real name Edward Constantin), who was part of a group the SEC charged with leveraging their social media accounts to pull off a pump-and-dump scheme. Those charges were dismissed earlier this year based on a Texas judge’s very odd interpretation of the exact mechanics needed to constitute securities fraud.

Roaring Kitty, on the other hand, posted videos with many disclaimers, was quick to shout out other fellow travelers doing fundamental analysis on GameStop, and urged the Reddit crowd who flocked to his YouTube channel in January 2021 to “maintain a sense of decorum” in the comment section. He was nonetheless hauled in front of a Congressional committee, had his millions in gains mentioned in the same breath as the millions in losses suffered by other retail traders, was investigated by the SEC, and sued multiple times. 

If @MrZackMorris was able to come out the other side of one legal battle, return to social media and tweet about stocks, well, it’s hard to see how posting memes was going to get @TheRoaringKitty into trouble this time around.

If this is indeed Keith Gill, and he was able to profit from another parabolic move in GameStop, he’s made a ridiculous amount of money in two of the most different of ways: The first time through doing painstakingly detailed fundamental research to conclude that he liked the stock. The second time, simply by having people assume that @TheRoaringKitty’s account tweeting memes implies he still likes the stock.

But... whether this was Gill or not is somewhat beside the point in trying to diagnose why this has happened before and played out as a much fainter echo yet again.

RoaringKitty’s DVF investing approach was hijacked by retail (and professional!) traders chasing momentum in January 2021. Keith Gill did not become popular with the retail audience because of his meticulous research on how GameStop’s estimated EBITDA over the next year would likely be in the same ballpark as its current enterprise value, limiting the potential downside in the stock. Barely anyone was really paying attention to his work even after the stock rallied about 400% in the last four months of 2020. He became a folk hero because he was betting big, winning big, and doubling down.

In both 2021 and today, people were willing to blindly outsource their due diligence to Keith Gill. The difference this time is no one’s pretending there’s a fundamental angle to rationalize the price action.

Whether this was the return of Achilles to the battlefield or some kind of Patroclus disguised in the demigod’s armor, the Myrmidons were itching for an excuse to return to war. And the meme stock retail trading battalion — and any algorithms and pros that piggybacked on Roaring Kitty’s tweets — were just looking for any opportunity to make a quick buck.