A GameStop location on 6th Avenue in New York on March 23, 2021.
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Shares of GameStop and AMC jumped around 50% in premarket trading on Tuesday, on track to extend gains after “Roaring Kitty,” the man at the center of the meme stock craze, posted online for the first time in roughly three years.
Shares of video game retailer GameStop traded 48% higher at 6:25 a.m. E.T., paring some of its earlier gains, while movie theater chain AMC rose over 55%.
Other so-called “meme stocks” were poised to open sharply higher on Tuesday. Shares of one-time dominant smartphone maker BlackBerry rose 25% in premarket trading, while headphones manufacturer Koss was up 20%.
The market moves follow dramatic gains for the stocks at the start of the trading week. GameStop on Monday climbed a whopping 74.4%, while AMC soared 78.4% in the previous trading session.
The meme stock phenomenon appears to have been reignited by a recent social media update from “Roaring Kitty.” The man, whose legal name is Keith Gill, posted a picture on the X platform of a video gamer sitting forward on their chair — a meme used by gamers to indicate they are taking the game seriously.
It marked Gill’s first post on the platform since 2021, and it has since been viewed more than 23 million times. Gill has followed up his return to the X platform with a series of posts of short videos from popular TV shows and movies, although the meaning behind them was unclear.
Gill is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Also known as DeepF——Value on Reddit, he drew an army of day traders who cheered each other on and piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock and in GameStop call options between 2020 and 2021.
The pandemic-era meme stock frenzy saw retail investors club together via social media platforms and online forums such as Reddit to drive up shares of certain previously unloved companies, putting pressure on hedge funds that had been betting they would decline in value.
Shares of GameStop, which hit an all-time intraday high of $120.75 in January 2021, later collapsed along with other meme stocks as interest faded. GameStop shares have been trending lower in recent years, touching a three-year low of $9.95 last month. They ended Monday at $30.45.
— CNBC’s Yun Li and Fred Imbert contributed to this report.