GameStop is surging for a second day — but one market guru calls the Reddit-fueled rally a 'speculation orgy'
- GameStop shares soared once again ahead of Tuesday's opening bell.
- Other meme stocks like AMC and BlackBerry have also racked up big gains this week.
GameStop and other big-name "meme stocks" kept rising ahead of Tuesday's opening bell — but some of the best-known voices in the market are highly skeptical about the rally.
Shares in the video game retailer were up another 57% shortly after 7 a.m. ET, building on Monday's 74% surge.
AMC, BlackBerry, and several other meme stocks — notable for their popularity on retail investing forums such as Reddit's r/WallStreetBets — also racked up major gains in early-morning trading.
Notable GameStop bull Keith Gill's return to social media appears to have driven the recent rally.
Gill, known as Roaring Kitty on X and YouTube and u/DeepFuckingValue on Reddit, made headlines in January 2021 when his bullish analyses of GameStop triggered a short squeeze.
Late Sunday, he posted on X for the first time in nearly three years, and he's since shared a series of clips from well-known movies and TV shows, including "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Snatch," and "Peaky Blinders."
Several big Wall Street names were quick to criticize Gill, who held 200,000 shares in GameStop as of his last portfolio update.
"Lol, is this 'I like the stock,' or 'I never specifically said to buy GameStop'? It's a Rorschach Test for Apes," high-profile short-seller Jim Chanos said on X, responding to a montage Gill shared that combined clips from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Breaking Bad" with a video of a cat waking up to Radiohead's 1997 track "Exit Music (For a Film)."
In another post on the social media platform, Larry McDonald, the former head of US macro strategy at Société Générale, called GameStop's surge a "speculation orgy, right in [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome] Powell's face."
Near-zero interest rates are widely believed to have helped fuel GameStop's original rally back in 2021. Since then, the Fed has raised borrowing costs to more than 5%, although some believe it'll need to go even further to help inflation fall in line with its 2% target.