A fifth-grade boy in Texas suddenly has more money than he’s had in his whole life, after cashing in the GameStop stocks he received as a gift two years ago.
Jaydyn Carr, 10, has been sitting on 10 GameStop shares since December 2019, when his mother Nina gave them to him as a Kwanzaa gift to teach him about economics. Nina spent a total of US$60 on the shares at the time, but their value soared this week amid a flurry of Reddit-driven interest in GameStop.
“My phone was going off, because I have GameStop on my watch list,” Nina Carr told local paper My San Antonio.
“I was trying to explain to him that this was unusual, I asked him: ‘Do you want to stay or sell?'”
Although many on Reddit would urge Jaydyn to “hold the line” as part of their “stick-it-to-the-man” plan, he decided to cash out.
Jaydyn agreed to sell the shares, and his $60 gift suddenly transformed into $3,200 cash — enough to buy a PlayStation 5, a gaming computer, or pretty much any video game-related thing a boy could dream of.
It was a major windfall for the boy, who has been learning about stocks alongside his mom for a while.
“Anytime I learn something, I show him as well,” Nina told My San Antonio. “I wanted to pass on the knowledge I have now because I learned it late in life. I want to give him a step up.”
She says she bought him shares in GameStop because of his love for video games, and printed off a certificate so he could unwrap it as a gift in late 2019. The gift was meant to reflect Ujamaa, one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa. Ujamaa encourages cooperative economics.
The whole world got a lesson in cooperation this week, when Reddit’s Wallstreetbets community decided to blow up GameStop stock with a flurry of small-time investments. The activity inflated Gamestop’s stock by a tremendous amount, thereby foiling the plans of major investors who had bet on the stock to fail. Redditors repeated the activity with several other struggling brands, including AMC, Nokia and BlackBerry, which squeezed Wall Street investors into losing an estimated $70 billion.
The GameStop effort — referred to as a “meme stock” on Reddit — has quickly turned into a David vs. Goliath match. Small investors have relished the pain they’ve caused on Wall Street, while e-trading apps such as Robinhood have locked several “meme stocks” to prevent users from taking the scheme any further.
Robinhood now faces a lawsuit and calls for Congressional investigation in the United States, amid accusations that it’s arbitrarily locking out small investors to protect wealthy hedge funds.
That might be a lot for Nina to explain to Jaydyn, but the boy appears to be on the right path with his own money. He plans to put $2,200 of his newfound cash into a savings account, and will invest the remaining $1,000 in something else.
Jaydyn says he’s looking at investing in the online gaming platform Roblox. However, Nina says she’ll make sure they do their due diligence before he commits any money to the business.
“I have to train him to let him know you can’t just buy anything, you have to read the charts,” she said.
She says her only regret is that she didn’t buy any GameStop stock for herself.
“I was not into video games. That’s not my scene,” she told My San Antonio.
“But I’m going to let him have his win.”
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