No Cats In Congress
TLDR – Man (possibly a cat) afflicted with diamond hands and steel testicles explains why he likes the stock
It’s the 18th of February 2021, just another typical lockdown Thursday. NASA’s Perseverance Rover was making its final descent to Mars, John Travolta and Yoko Ono celebrated their birthdays, and the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services was about to smash its record viewing figures by several hundred percent.
Thirty-four year old Keith Gill was set to testify before Congress. Financial Analyst by day and Trading YouTuber by night. He’s known on Twitter and YouTube as Roaring Kitty and on Reddit as u/deepfuckingvalue or DFV. He was the first to invest heavily in the stock and was seen by many as the unofficial leader of the GameStop movement. At that moment, the value in his trading account was hovering around $17 million.
Gill delivered his initial statement to Congress with a straight face and a steely look in his eyes. Dressed in a fresh suit, he sat in front of a poster of a cat clinging on to a tightrope that read “Hang In There!”. Perched on his now-famous chair, emblazoned with a Game of Thrones House Lannister sigil, he calmly delivered his prepared statement to the Congressional committee,
“Thank you Chairwoman Waters, Ranking Member McHenry, members of the committee. I’m happy to discuss with the committee my purchases of GameStop shares and my discussions of their fair value on social media.“
I watched from my childhood home in Northern Ireland, the room I slept in through the 2008 crash and the ensuing “credit crunch”, as it was dubbed by the British media. It seems like a lifetime ago now. Though I may have been alone in my room, I was far from alone. Around the world, hundreds of thousands held their breath as they tuned in to the Zoom Congressional Committee – Congress had not yet returned to in-person hearings in the midst of lockdowns. Their hero was speaking. The ultimate retard. The Michael Burry of his generation.
Reddit’s WallStreetBets page was ablaze with memes. The Congressional Hearing Megathread was lighting up. Were they going to try to pin this whole thing on DFV? Would anyone be able to pin down Ken Griffin? Comments and discussions bounced back and forth. Rumours were rife that Congress was going to side with Wall Street, again. But this time we would not go gently into that goodnight. Many of us had watched Occupy spring up and unravel itself, destroyed by infighting and besieged by the police. But we would not allow this movement gathering around GameStop to succumb to the same fate.
Redditors speculated about the meaning of his poster. Some argued that the poster hanging on his wall was a reference to the episode of The Simpsons in which Marge invests in a Pretzel company and hangs a remarkably similar poster in her “office”. But to most of the online community watching his every move, the symbolism was clear: hang in there. Remain steadfast. Don’t sell. Have “diamond hands”. In the end, this is a story about diamond hands. By the time of the hearing, it had already become more than just investing. It was a war against the financial system. And how does one win that war? In this case, by never selling. By having diamond hands. We’ll get onto why something so simple caused financial shockwaves that led me to writing this book a little later. For now all you need to know is that we had to HODL (Hold On For Dear Life) our GameStop stock.
Those blessed with diamond hands don’t sell because the price dipped, they don’t panic in the face of profits or sell signals. When the whole world is telling them to move, they won’t. Insteaed they remain calm because they believe the stock price will still rise; they trust their research (or their memes). Those with glimmering palms do not panic because the price has depreciated to the rest of the normie world. Investing requires patience, confidence, and some would even say faith, in your actions. You have to trust your decisions. It is not for the faint-hearted or the easily spooked.
Those who panic when a stock dips are known as paper hands – people who bolt at the first sign of trouble in case they lose more money. They don’t want to be left bag-holding. Bag holding is what happens when you buy a stock as it rises and then as it drops below the price you paid, you fail or refuse to sell. In other words you are left holding the bag – sometimes at a massive loss. However, you have to risk bag-holding if you are going to have diamond hands.
For the hundreds of thousands around the world, Gill was the ultimate Diamond-Hander. He had stood steadfast in spite of price drops and ridicule, because he believed in his analysis of the company and it had paid off spectacularly. To imitate him we would HODL through everything. They would have to pry the stocks from our cold dead hands.
Gill continued,
“It is true that my investment in that company multiplied in value many times for that I feel enormously fortunate. I also believe the current price of the shares demonstrates that i’ve been right about the company.
A few things I am not. I am not a cat. I am not an institutional investor.”
You read that right, it’s not a typo, “I am not a cat”. He decided to declare in a Congressional hearing on a freak financial event, involving tens of billions of dollars, fielding accusations of market manipulation, that he is not a cat. That will now be in the Congressional records for as long as they exist. The peculiar absurdity of our current reality is something I’ll address in more depth later on, but for now, simply consider the fact that a niche meme referring to a lawyer who had struggled to turn off a Zoom filter days earlier was watched by a record audience and has been etched, unquestioned, into U.S. Congressional records. As America stands right now that could conceivably last a few months or a few hundred years, it’s quite hard to tell. Regardless, I still find it incredulous that a man has decided to clarify, before a United States Congressional Committee, under oath, that he is not a cat. And no one asked what he meant.
We may never have been gifted such a moment if his testimony were delivered in person, though maybe I am underestimating him. I feel the combination of the occasion, the building, the procedure, the oath-taking, and the real-life audience, might have otherwise influenced his spoken words. So perhaps we can thank lockdowns and the rise of Zoom calls for providing such a historic moment. Now, don’t go thinking I’ve decided to begin the book on some sort of ridiculous part of this story just to hook you in, that’s just the beginning. By the end this will seem like one of the more normal parts of this tragic comedy about our financial system.
By the end of January 2021. Keith Gill’s net worth passed $40 million. And yet, he did not sell. He diamond-handed it. So why had he decided to invest in GameStop in the first place? Let’s back up just a little…
Read on by ordering below…
To The Moon: The GameStop Saga
Get your hands on To The Moon: The GameStop Saga and get your name in the acknowledgments!
This book is an attempt to chronicle and explain the GameStop saga, the psychological games that were played, the extraordinary online community that rose to this historic occasion, and the financial warfare that has taken place on a new digital frontier.
It is a journey through complex stock market jargon, memes, and in-jokes created by r/WallStreetBets (an online forum on reddit.com) and the other online communities that sprung up around it. It’s a story packed with wild gambling, bandwagon-jumping, digital guerilla warfare, and diamond hands.
It’s a story that, much like our entire lives at the moment, had no precedent, no rule book, and no map to follow.