GameStop GME.US made a stunning comeback, soaring from $17 to $80 in three days, and meme stocks began to squeeze out. According to S3 Partners data, GME shorts have lost a total of $1 billion due to the sharp rise in intraday trading on Monday.

Other meme stocks also rose collectively due to Keith's return. $AMC Cinemas (AMC.US)$, which is also a core meme stock, closed up 78.4%. The most amazing thing is the meme $pepe and $people in our cryptocurrency also soared, and pepe followed suit and also went ath.

This tweet was interpreted as another clarion call to beat up Wall Street, and has been viewed more than 25 million times on X. He then posted a bunch of movie clips suggesting that the characters would return to fight again. Prior to this, his last tweet was in June 2021. 0:45 / 1:07

Who is Keith Gill? The leader of retail investors and the protagonist of the short squeeze war of the century

How can Keith Gill have such great power to detonate the US stock market with just one tweet?

The reason why Keith has such a high status in the minds of retail investors is that he led the "meme stock war" between retail investors and Wall Street institutions in 2020-2021.

Keith's main job is the director of financial education at MassMutual Insurance. He began posting on Twitter to share his investment experience in 2014. Since 2019, he has been posting on WallstreetBets, an investment community on Reddit, to sing praises of GameStop, believing that the stock is undervalued.

GameStop was founded in 1984 and mainly engaged in the rental and sales of physical game cartridges. At its peak, it had nearly 7,000 stores worldwide and was a childhood memory of many European and American gamers.

However, with the advent of the Internet age, more and more gamers choose to buy games in Sony and Microsoft's digital stores. Physical cartridges have almost become "antiques", and GameStop's business has become increasingly bleak. It suffered a huge loss of US$795 million in 2019, and its stock price unsurprisingly fell sharply from more than US$20 to a low of around US$3.

The sluggish performance and plummeting stock prices naturally attracted many bloodthirsty short sellers, especially Wall Street institutions. These institutions bet that GameStop's stock price will continue to fall, hoping to make another profit before the company goes bankrupt.

Throughout 2020, GameStop became the most shorted stock in the U.S., with its share price below $10 most of the time.

But Keith insisted on being bullish on GameStop online, frequently posting screenshots of the actual market on Reddit. No matter how the stock price went up or down, he would only buy and not sell. Coincidentally, during this period, GameStop had the support of American billionaire Ryan Cohen, who also believed that GameStop could become the "Amazon of the gaming industry" through reform and bought a large amount of GameStop's stock.

After the counterattack by many parties, by the end of 2020, the stock price of GameStop continued to rise, and the funds in Keith's account also increased from 50,000 US dollars to hundreds of thousands and 10 million US dollars. More and more retail investors look at Keith with admiration and envy.

At this time, the game between bulls and bears became increasingly fierce. Some technical retail investors believed that the short selling ratio of GameStop stock was as high as 140%. If retail investors continued to buy in groups and push up the price of GameStop stock, then since the actual number of stocks in circulation was less than the number borrowed, the short sellers would have to rush to buy back the stocks to reduce losses, pushing the GameStop stock price to continue to rise, which is the so-called "short squeeze" market.

But short-selling agency Citron scoffed at this and released a report mocking retail investors who followed the trend and bought GameStop, saying that they would end up losing all their money.

As it turned out, the arrogant Citron did not see the situation clearly.

At that time, due to the impact of the epidemic blockade, the number of new retail investors entering the US market increased significantly. These people not only held huge financial subsidies from the Biden administration, but also had been educated about the rise of the cryptocurrency circle and accepted the concept of high-volatility investment. More importantly, many small retail investors hated Wall Street institutions that represented traditional financial forces and were eager to fight for GameStop, which symbolized their beautiful childhood memories.

Keith became the leader of these retail investors. He wore his iconic red headscarf and broadcast live on YouTube every day, calling on everyone to buy GameStop shares.

On January 4, 2021, GameStop closed at $17.25 per share. By the end of the month, it had reached a high of more than $500 per share. Throughout 2021, GameStop's stock price rose by more than 1,000%, also driving other meme stocks such as AMC and BlackBerry. AMC's highest range increase even reached 2,300%. Hedge funds with a scale of tens of billions of dollars were forced to close their positions and were beaten by small retail investors.

Keith deserves credit for this. This century-long short squeeze battle between retail investors and institutions was hailed by retail investors as the "battle of David and Goliath" and was even adapted into the movie "Dumb Money".

The short squeeze war of the century shocked Congress. Keith announced his retirement from the Internet

Eventually, the meme stock movement that swept the U.S. stock market alarmed the U.S. authorities. In February of that year, Treasury Secretary Yellen convened a meeting of regulators to discuss the impact of the meme stock movement. Keith, as a key figure, was later summoned to testify in the U.S. Congress.

He emphasized to Congress that he was just an individual investor, did not belong to any institution, did not provide professional financial advice, and his views were only for "educational purposes." He just believed that GameStop's main business was underestimated by the market and that the company could be reformed to adapt to the digital game retail world.

In his testimony, he also explained why he shared his views on social media, saying he did so because:

Hedge funds and other Wall Street firms have teams of analysts who work together to compile research reports and comment on investment ideas, but individual investors do not have such advantages.

Keith also insisted in his written testimony that the idea that he alone instigated the meme stock surge was "ridiculous."

The idea that I used social media to promote GameStop stock to uninformed investors is ridiculous, and I am very clear that my channel is for educational purposes only. … Whether other individual investors buy the stock is irrelevant to my argument.

In June 2021, Keith posted a video of a kitten sleeping on Twitter, and then disappeared from social media until his sudden return on May 13.

According to media reports, Keith initially bought $53,000 worth of GameStop shares in 2019 and has since increased his holdings several times. At the peak of the meme stock price surge, his holdings were worth approximately $48 million.