Important investor Keith Gill, also known as Roaring Kitty, came back to social media this year and sent a number of stocks skyrocketing. This put meme stocks back in the spotlight.
Even though the 2021 meme-stock craze, in which Gill played a key role, wasn’t as big this time, it did have an effect on a lot of names that were greatly shortened. As they did in 2021, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (AMC 1.06%) and GameStop Corp. (GME 11.99%) may have gotten the most attention, but the latest meme wave also hit Koss Corp. (KOSS 1.47%), BlackBerry Ltd. (BB -1.65%), SunPower Corp. (SPWRQ 0.00%), Maxeon Solar Technologies Ltd. (MAXN -12.44%), MicroCloud Hologram Inc. (HOLO 5.57%), Children’s Place Inc. (PLCE -11.60%), Beyond Meat Inc. (BYND 0.47%), Spirit Airlines Inc. (SAVE -1.19%), and Plug Power Inc. (PLUG -5.83%). Chewy Inc. CHWY -4.34% was also caught, and it turned out that Gill had a big role in the online store that sells food and other items for pets.
A group of academics from the U.K. released a study in May that looked at how social media stock traders change their behavior. The study looked at how people felt in the WallStreetBets group on Reddit. It looked at data from 2014 to 2021. The language model was taught on about 1 million comments and about 10,000 posts were looked at.
It was clear in 2021 that a community that most people don’t know much about had an effect on a single stock and the market as a whole, said Richard Whittle, a university fellow in artificial intelligence and human behavior at Salford Business School and one of the study’s co-authors. “This is what happens when there is a community that feels left behind.”
