After two surreal days of spectacular gains, it looks like GameStop is finally crashing back down to reality.
On Wednesday, GameStop stock (GME) crashed some 30% in the market’s opening minutes, to $34.12 as of this writing.
That slippage wiped away a major chunk of the remarkable rally enjoyed by the stock this week, which began on Sunday when Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty—the meme stock influencer who architected GME’s Reddit-fueled short squeeze in 2021—appeared to return online after years of silence.
Still, today’s crash has yet to wipe out the full extent of GME’s recent gains. The Nasdaq has already been automatically halted GME trading six times before 11 a.m. EST, according to NasdaqTrader.
Before Roaring Kitty’s apparent return, on Friday, GameStop closed at $17.39. The influencer’s resurfacing brought the stock as high as $64.83 yesterday—an almost 4x increase from last week’s close. It’s not an unheard of gain in crypto, but it’s highly unusual on Wall Street.
Some lucky traders may have walked away with millions thanks to GME’s roller coaster ride—assuming they stayed in long enough and got out in time. One trader who invested $27,000 in GME call contracts on April 24 that expire Friday, would have made $2 million off the trade.
Roaring Kitty’s supposed return (the influencer has only posted GIFs and memes to Gill’s Twitter account, and hasn’t otherwise verified his identity) has also lifted other assets related to his former exploits—though those charms appear to be wearing off as well.
AMC, another meme stock that boomed amid the 2021 craze, is also down 30% today, to $4.82 at writing (the stock hit $11.90 at one point on Tuesday). And GME, a Solana meme coin inspired by the GameStop short squeeze saga, is down 23.9% in the last 24 hours, after surging yesterday to an all-time high.
Today it's Floki Inu (FLOKI) that's been leading the meme coin pack. Earlier today the token, inspired by Elon Musk's pet Shiba Inu dog, was showing 24-hour gains of 17%, according to CoinGecko data. It's an interesting outcome because some of the messages sent by Gill in the past couple days included a video that says “the dog days are over.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.