A GameStop location on 6th Avenue in New York on March 23, 2021.
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Shares of GameStop and AMC jumped around 40% 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 37% higher at 5:10 a.m. E.T., while movie theater chain AMC rose over 36%.
Other so-called “meme stocks” were poised to open sharply higher on Tuesday. Shares of one-time dominant smartphone maker BlackBerry rose more than 27% in premarket trading, while headphones manufacturer Koss was up 18%.
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.
In a recent update on social media platform X, “Roaring Kitty” posted a picture of a video gamer sitting forward on their chair — a meme used by gamers to indicate they are taking the game seriously.
It marked Roaring Kitty’s first post on the platform since 2021, and it has since been viewed more than 23 million times.
Roaring Kitty, whose legal name is Keith Gill, is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Also known as DeepF——Value on Reddit, Gill 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.
— CNBC’s Yun Li and Fred Imbert contributed to this report.