GameStop shares rose 13.3% on Monday, after Keith Gill, the popular online retailer behind last month’s frantic rally, announced that he had doubled his investment in the troubled retailer.
GameStop shares opened at $ 46.8 on Monday and closed at $ 46. GameStop closed at $ 40.68 per share on Friday. Gill announced on Reddit after the market closed on Friday that it had bought another 50,000 shares of the company to bring its 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 for planting seeds that have turned into a massive rally in GameStop stocks. The company’s share price rose about 1,800 percent in January to $ 483 last month before it collapsed.
Gill told a House committee on Thursday that his first Reddit posts supporting GameStop investments were nothing more than an attempt to share a potential opportunity with other amateur traders who got out of control. Critics of the GameStop rally say Gill and other prominent Reddit users could be to blame for manipulating the market.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced last month that it is examining possible manipulation practices that could take place around the GameStop frenzy, but securities lawyers say the public nature of the rally makes it difficult to choose a conspiracy.