Keith Gill's GameStop Congressional Testimony ('I am not a cat')
February 2021
On Feb. 18, 2021, the r/wallstreetbets figure 'DeepFuckingValue' testified before the House Financial Services Committee, denying he coordinated the GameStop squeeze and insisting he was an ordinary investor.
What happened
On February 18, 2021, Keith Patrick Gill testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services at a hearing examining the GameStop trading frenzy ('Game Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide'). Gill, who posted on Reddit's r/wallstreetbets as 'DeepFuckingValue' and on YouTube as 'Roaring Kitty,' opened with the now-famous line, 'A few things I am not: I am not a cat. I am not an institutional investor. Nor am I a hedge fund,' and stated 'I like the stock.'
In his written and oral testimony Gill maintained that he was an individual investor acting on genuine analysis, that he did not solicit or coordinate others' trades, and that his enthusiasm for GameStop was sincere. The testimony was directly relevant to the parallel civil litigation (the Iovin securities-fraud class action had been filed two days earlier) because it framed his defense that he had not assumed a false 'everyman' persona to manipulate the market.
Lawmakers largely directed sharper questioning at hedge-fund and brokerage executives on the same panel (including Robinhood, Citadel, and Melvin Capital). The hearing crystallized the public and regulatory reckoning over Reddit-driven retail trading.
Impact
The defining public moment of the Reddit meme-stock saga; Gill's sworn denial of coordination became central to his defense in the securities-fraud litigation and to the broader policy debate over social-media-driven trading.