Keith Gill – aka DeepF—ingValue – has told Congress that he had nothing to do with the GameStop bubble, saying “I did not belong to any groups trying to create movements in the stock price”.
“The idea that I used social media to promote GameStop stock to unwitting investors is preposterous,” Mr Gill told Congress.
“I was abundantly clear that my channel was for educational purposes only, and that my aggressive style of investing was unlikely to be suitable for most folks checking out the channel. Whether other individual investors bought the stock was irrelevant to my thesis – my focus was on the fundamentals of the business.”
Mr Gill’s YouTube channel, where he shared his research on the fundamentals of GameStop, become a touchstone for the wave of retail investors who piled into GME through January – but when he first invested in the stock, few took him seriously.
“There were rarely more than a few dozen folks on the stream on any night. The reality was people didn’t really care about five boring, repetitive analysis of GameStop and other stocks, and that was fine,” Mr Gill said.
“For those of us who did care, the stream provided us an outlet for refining our fundamentals-based thesis. We were able to analyse events in real-time and keep each other honest.”
Mr Gill maintains that he took advantage of two factors – the market overestimating the likelihood of GameStop actually going bankrupt, and GameStop’s potential to reinvent itself through the digital economy – to buy GME at a steep discount, though many of his options “expired worthless” because the price stayed depressed for longer than he anticipated.
“Ultimately my GameStop investment was a success. But the thing is, I felt that way in December far before the peak, when the stock was at $20 a share. I was so happy to visit my family in Brockton for the holidays and give them the great news – we were millionaires. That money will go such a long way for my family,” Mr Gill said.
Mr Gill said that the stock price “may have gotten a bit ahead of itself” but that he remains bullish on its prospects, warning that the market “remains oblivious” to the opportunity in front of it.
