- A 10-year-old made more than a 5,000% profit when he sold 10 GameStop shares he was gifted in late 2019.
- The battle between Redditors and hedge funds with short positions on GameStop shares remains ongoing.
Amidst all of the drama involving a subreddit’s effort to bankrupt hedge funds by driving up the price of GameStop shares, a surprising number of heartwarming stories have emerged. As a prime example, some Redditors who amassed tens of thousands of dollars in profits — if not more — when GameStop shares started to skyrocket used the proceeds to help pay off medical bills of family members.
Another story that recently came to light involves a 10-year-old named Jaydyn Carr from San Antonio who sold the 10 GameStop shares he was gifted from his mom in late 2019 for Kwanzaa. As relayed by My San Antonio, Carr’s mom purchased 10 GameStop shares at $6/share on Carr’s behalf a little more than a year ago.
Last week, with GameStop shares hitting record-setting highs, Carr sold his stock for $320/share and walked away with a cool $3,200, or about $3,140 in pure profit.
“My phone was going off because I have GameStop on my watch list,” Carr’s mother said. “I was trying to explain to him that this was unusual, I asked him ‘Do you want to stay or sell?'”
The majority of Carr’s newfound wealth is going into his savings account. Still, Carr plans to re-invest about $1,000 from his profits and learn more about the stock market in the process.
The heartwarming story aside, the saga between Wall Street and Reddit remains unresolved. There’s still a tremendous amount of short interest in GameStop shares, and a perusal of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit shows that many people are planning to hold their shares indefinitely.
All the while, the saga has attracted the attention of lawmakers, particularly after RobinHood and other trading platforms limited the ability for some traders to purchase additional GameStop shares. The move was quickly viewed as market manipulation and prompted lawmakers like U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to speak up on the matter.
“This is unacceptable,” AOC said last week. “We now need to know more about RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit. As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary.”
For what it’s worth, RobinHood recently explained why they prevented people from purchasing additional GameStop shares last week:
The amount required by clearinghouses to cover the settlement period of some securities rose tremendously this week. How much? To put it in perspective, this week alone, our clearinghouse-mandated deposit requirements related to equities increased ten-fold. And that’s what led us to put temporary buying restrictions in place on a small number of securities that the clearinghouses had raised their deposit requirements on.
It was not because we wanted to stop people from buying these stocks. We did this because the required amount we had to deposit with the clearinghouse was so large—with individual volatile securities accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in deposit requirements—that we had to take steps to limit buying in those volatile securities to ensure we could comfortably meet our requirements.
Our goal is to enable purchasing for all securities on our platform. This is a dynamic, volatile market, and we have and may continue to take action to make sure we meet our requirements as a broker so we can continue to serve our customers for the long term.
Meanwhile, the SEC said it’s looking for potential misconduct with respect to all parties involved. At the close of trading on Monday, GameStop shares were down 100 points, or about 30.77% for the day. The stock continued to drop in Tuesday morning’s pre-market session.
