Jeremy@Jeremybtc
A financial analyst turned $53,000 into $48 MILLION posting stock tips on Reddit from his basement. He nearly broke Wall Street doing it.
> In September 2019, Keith Gill was a 34 year old financial analyst at MassMutual earning a regular salary.
> Under the username DeepFuckingValue on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube, he posted a screenshot of a $53,000 bet on GameStop.
> A dying video game retailer that Wall Street had been shorting into the ground.
> Gill had spotted something. Hedge funds had borrowed and sold 140% of GameStop’s available shares.
> Mathematically impossible to cover without buying every share back at any price.
> For over a year, he was ignored. His posts were downvoted and mocked.
> Then in January 2021, Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum discovered his position and started buying.
> GameStop went from $4 to $483 in three weeks.
The short sellers were trapped. Every dollar the stock went up cost them more money.
> Melvin Capital lost 53% of its fund in one month and had to be bailed out with $2.75 BILLION. It shut down completely in 2022.
> Total hedge fund losses exceeded $20 BILLION.
> Roaring Kitty was streaming the entire thing live on YouTube from his basement, wearing a red bandana, drinking from a cat mug.
> By January 27 his $53,000 was worth $48 MILLION.
> Then Robinhood froze the buy button. The sell button still worked. The stock crashed within hours.
> Robinhood’s biggest customer was Citadel. Citadel had just bailed out Melvin Capital the same week.
> Congress called emergency hearings and subpoenaed Gill to testify. His entire opening line was five words. “I like the stock.”
> Hollywood made a movie about him called Dumb Money. Netflix made a documentary called Eat the Rich.
> He disappeared from the internet for three years.
> He returned in May 2024 with a single meme posted on X. GameStop pumped 50% on the news he was back.
> Days later he revealed he had quietly built a 5 million share GameStop position worth $180 MILLION during his silence.
> His net worth peaked at $289 MILLION.
> A guy in a basement saw what every hedge fund analyst on Wall Street had missed.
> He posted it for free on Reddit.
The system that called him an idiot ended up rewriting its own rules to stop him.