Published in Svenska Dagbladet, 2024-06-03. Translated from Swedish.

Keith Gill had been silent on social media for more than three years. Then, on Sunday morning, he posted a screenshot on Reddit showing a position of five million GameStop shares — worth around 1.2 billion kronor — plus options worth another 691 million kronor. The GameStop era is apparently not over.

It is difficult to know what to call what Keith Gill did on Sunday. Technically it is not market manipulation, because he is not spreading false information about the company. What he is doing is using his own celebrity — built on a genuine investment thesis that turned into one of the most spectacular trading events in history — to move markets.

In mid-May he posted a series of cryptic images on X, including one of a person leaning forward in a gaming chair. That alone was enough to send GameStop’s stock up more than 70 percent before the New York Stock Exchange had even opened.

Then came Sunday’s Reddit post: a screenshot of a brokerage account showing five million GameStop shares worth roughly 1.2 billion kronor, plus options worth a further 691 million kronor. The stock surged again.

When Gill testified before Congress in 2021, he said: “The idea that I used social media to promote GameStop stock to unwitting investors is absurd.” That statement is now very hard to defend. It is difficult to argue he did not know how the market would react — the entire social media build-up looked, in hindsight, like a carefully orchestrated prelude.

What makes the situation genuinely complicated is that a significant part of the market actively wants to be manipulated in this way. GameStop trades like a lottery ticket, and everyone who buys it knows it trades like a lottery ticket. There is something almost philosophical about a market where the participants are fully aware they are speculating on the speculations of others.

Should Gill pull this off, he could go down in history for more reasons than having been the central figure of the meme-stock era. Nearly two billion kronor in notional value before the market had even opened — not bad for a financial adviser with an investment thesis posted on the internet.