Stock market
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One more that I hope is funny as no one thinks is a means to education.
Scio me nihil scire
There are no kings inside the gates of eden0 -
Scio me nihil scire
There are no kings inside the gates of eden0 -
Teh man who drove the GME mania on WBS sat down with the WSJ. He has $33 million in his Etrade account, across multiple portfolios. Like I've been saying, this isn't rich vs the poor. https://www.wsj.com/articles/keith-gill-drove-the-gamestop-reddit-mania-he-talked-to-the-journal-11611931696
The investor who helped direct the world’s attention to GameStop, leading a horde of online followers in a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next, says he’s just a normal guy.
“I didn’t expect this,” said Keith Gill, 34 years old, known as “DeepF—ingValue” by fans on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum and “Dada” by his 2-year-old daughter. He said he didn’t set out to draw the attention of Congress, the Federal Reserve, hedge funds, the media, trading platforms and hundreds of thousands of investors.
“This story is so much bigger than me,” Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock market game. “I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement.”
To many of them, Mr. Gill—who until recently worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.—is the force behind the triple-digit gains in shares of the videogame retailer GameStop, up more than 900% this year through Thursday. On Wednesday, the stock jumped 135% to $347.51, a record, before plunging to $194 a share Thursday as online brokerages clamped down. At the start of the year, GameStop shares went for around $18.
Many online investors say his advocacy helped turn them into a force powerful enough to cause big losses for established hedge funds and, for the moment, turn the investing world upside down.
Mr. Gill posted a screenshot of his brokerage account Wednesday, showing a roughly $20 million daily gain on GameStop shares and options. “Your steady hand convinced many of us to not only buy, but hold. Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people. Seriously thank you. You deserve every penny,” replied one Reddit user, reality_czech.
Online traders credit Mr. Gill with helping power the GameStop frenzy this week.
The next day, Mr. Gill posted another screenshot—showing about a $15 million loss. After Thursday’s market close, his E*Trade brokerage account, viewed by the Journal, held around $33 million, including GameStop stock, options and millions in cash.
“He always liked money,” said Elaine Gill, his mother. As a child, she said, “he would get money from those scratch tickets that people didn’t know they’d won. People would throw them on the ground…A lot of times there was still money on them.”
Mr. Gill’s online persona—he goes by “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube—has drawn tens of thousands of fans and copycats who share screenshots of their own brokerage accounts. As the GameStop frenzy peaked this week, hundreds of thousands of new investors downloaded applications like Robinhood to join the action, according to Apptopia Inc.
How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyYOU MAY ALSO LIKEUP NEXT0:00 / 4:144:14
How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyWall Street is in an uproar over GameStop shares this week, after members of Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets forum encouraged bets on the video game retailer. WSJ explains how options trading is driving the action and what’s at stake.Mr. Gill said he wasn’t a rabble-rouser out to take on the establishment, just someone who believes investors can find value in unloved stocks. He never expected to have a legion of fans debating his identity online, or millions of dollars in his trading account, he said. He was just a dad with an online hobby and a plastic kiddie slide on the front lawn of a Boston suburb.
Mr. Gill began investing in GameStop around June 2019, he said, when it was hovering around $5 a share. Earlier that year, the game retailer was hunting for its fifth chief executive in a little over 12 months. Mr. Gill kept buying. Although he never played much besides Super Mario or Donkey Kong, he saw potential for the struggling retailer to reinvigorate itself by attracting new customers with the latest videogame consoles.
“People were doing a quick take, saying GameStop was the next Blockbuster, ” he said, a chain caught in a retail decline. “It appeared many folks just weren’t digging in deeper. It was a gross misclassification of the opportunity.”
Mr. Gill, tall with shoulder-length hair, opened a YouTube channel last summer, and he worked in the basement of the home he rents in Wilmington, Mass., to avoid disturbing his daughter after bedtime, he said. On his channel, he touted GameStop and Belgian beers. His favorite is Delirium Tremens.
On a recent YouTube live-stream, he wore a red headband and aviator sunglasses while fielding questions on stocks. He poured himself Prosecco then switched to beer as he celebrated big gains and gave shout-outs to legions of viewers and traders in a seven-hour-plus extravaganza. The stream has tallied more than 200,000 views.
Mr. Gill’s obscene username on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum is supposed to reflect a belief in value investing—buying shares of companies that are inexpensive relative to the underlying business.
Among his many Reddit fans, Mr. Gill “will go down as the greatest legend in the history of WallStreetBets,” said Jon Hagedorn, a 34-year-old training supervisor based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. “He’s the original OG.”
The stock’s wild ride, seemingly divorced from standard measures of corporate value, has spurred complaints that investors banding together to provoke this kind of frenzy amounts to market manipulation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday it would “act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity.” Mr. Gill said he hasn’t heard from the SEC.
Fast times
“The first thing that I had asked him when this craziness started was: is this illegal or anything dishonest? He said, ‘No mom, it’s not,’” recalled Ms. Gill, who lives in Brockton, Mass., where she and Steve Gill raised their son.
In high school, Mr. Gill was a distance runner, and he earned national honors on the team at nearby Stonehill College, where he graduated in 2009 with an accounting major. He ran a four-minute mile until sidelined by an Achilles injury.
Mr. Gill moved to New Hampshire for a few years and found a mentor, an investor and software developer his aunt introduced him to. He holds a designation as a Chartered Financial Analyst and said he was drawn by the complexity and challenge of stock picking, which became an outlet for the energy he once put into running. He started working at MassMutual in 2019.
A notebook with notes on stocks and an '8 Ball' toy that Keith Gill uses in his video streams. At the end of his YouTube stream, Mr. Gill and his viewers ask questions of the '8 Ball' about how a stock will perform.In the summer of 2019, he started building his position in GameStop and would post screenshots of his E*Trade account’s options positions on WallStreetBets forum. “Holy s— bro, what made you drop 53K on GameStop?” one trader posted about one of Mr. Gill’s screenshots in September 2019.
In the months that followed, he posted regularly, putting up a “GME YOLO update,” a reference to GameStop’s ticker and the mantra “you only live once.” He showed off gains in the five- and six-digits, and times when his investments plunged.
Mr. Gill stuck with GameStop, and his wagers became day-trader lore.
To fans, he tapped into the desire by millions of amateur investors around the U.S. to try their hand at stock trading. Trading fees have fallen to zero, and apps allow investors to buy and sell on their phones. The easy market access is augmented by an online community swelled with eager helpers.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Did you join in the trading frenzy this week?Join the conversation below.
Many first-time investors stuck at home in the pandemic said they found solace in chatting with others online about trading stocks or options, as well as hearing from those making profitable bets.
The discourse isn’t always positive. An off-Reddit chat room associated with WallStreetBets is filled with obscenity, racism and antigay screeds. Many on the platforms lash out against Wall Street power players, and some express a desire to see the financial pros reel from losses.
“I’m not out for anybody,” Mr. Gill said. “Roaring Kitty was an educational channel where I was showcasing my investment philosophy.”
Bear bust
Many on Wall Street disagreed with Mr. Gill’s bullish view on GameStop and have taken a big hit as a result. Hedge funds and other investment professionals piled into wagers that the shares would tumble.
To bet against a stock, hedge funds borrow shares and sell them, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price and return them. That allows them to pocket the difference between the prices. But when a shorted stock stages such a dramatic rally, it turns painful, often forcing them to exit from the positions by purchasing shares at a loss. In turn, that can inspire sharp gains in stocks, known as a “short squeeze.”
The bearish positioning of hedge funds was part of what drew many small GameStop investors, anticipating a short squeeze. Mr. Gill said his investing strategy didn’t entirely depend on a short squeeze, but he knew others were potentially betting on it.
So far, the professionals have been wrong, giving a win to Mr. Gill and other individual investors who bet big on GameStop. Hedge funds like Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital were the ones burned, as well as jeered by boastful Reddit investors.
Many others have piled into GameStop, trying to ride the rally “to the moon,” as many Reddit investors say. Individual investors have also piled into shares of companies like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. in the hopes of catching similar momentum and making a quick buck.
GameStop has garnered hundreds of thousands of posts over the past month across Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, according to data this week from Meltwater, a global media intelligence company. As the stock has vaulted higher, its shares have traded in a frenzy, making it one of the most popular bets in the U.S. market in recent days, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Keith Gill at his basement work station in Wilmington, Mass.
Seasoned traders are starting to take into account the behavior of influential investors like Mr. Gill and others.
Mark Sebastian, founder of Chicago-based Options Pit and an options trader for around 20 years, has developed a screener analyzing reams of stocks to spot those with heavy activity from individual investors. He buys or sells options based on which stocks are gaining momentum, trying to ride the wave higher or lower. Recently, this included AMC, though he said he wasn’t a fan.
“We’re trying to get on these names before they completely take off,” Mr. Sebastian said, calling one recent trade “free money.”
Mr. Gill said his life has changed overnight and hasn’t set his future plans. He would like to continue the “Roaring Kitty” YouTube channel, maybe buy a house. “I thought this trade would be successful,” he said, “but I never expected what happened over the past week.”
He has one dream in mind. “I always wanted to build an indoor track facility or a field house in Brockton,” he said of his hometown. “And now, it looks like I actually could do that.”
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Sounds like amateur makes good story. What was his portfolio several years ago? I didn’t see that in the story. I’m not anti wealth. If the guy went from 70k-100k a year at a sit down job and created millions with his hobby that is great. If he had millions to begin with that’s a different story.mrussel1 said:Teh man who drove the GME mania on WBS sat down with the WSJ. He has $33 million in his Etrade account, across multiple portfolios. Like I've been saying, this isn't rich vs the poor. https://www.wsj.com/articles/keith-gill-drove-the-gamestop-reddit-mania-he-talked-to-the-journal-11611931696The investor who helped direct the world’s attention to GameStop, leading a horde of online followers in a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next, says he’s just a normal guy.
“I didn’t expect this,” said Keith Gill, 34 years old, known as “DeepF—ingValue” by fans on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum and “Dada” by his 2-year-old daughter. He said he didn’t set out to draw the attention of Congress, the Federal Reserve, hedge funds, the media, trading platforms and hundreds of thousands of investors.
“This story is so much bigger than me,” Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock market game. “I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement.”
To many of them, Mr. Gill—who until recently worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.—is the force behind the triple-digit gains in shares of the videogame retailer GameStop, up more than 900% this year through Thursday. On Wednesday, the stock jumped 135% to $347.51, a record, before plunging to $194 a share Thursday as online brokerages clamped down. At the start of the year, GameStop shares went for around $18.
Many online investors say his advocacy helped turn them into a force powerful enough to cause big losses for established hedge funds and, for the moment, turn the investing world upside down.
Mr. Gill posted a screenshot of his brokerage account Wednesday, showing a roughly $20 million daily gain on GameStop shares and options. “Your steady hand convinced many of us to not only buy, but hold. Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people. Seriously thank you. You deserve every penny,” replied one Reddit user, reality_czech.
Online traders credit Mr. Gill with helping power the GameStop frenzy this week.
The next day, Mr. Gill posted another screenshot—showing about a $15 million loss. After Thursday’s market close, his E*Trade brokerage account, viewed by the Journal, held around $33 million, including GameStop stock, options and millions in cash.
“He always liked money,” said Elaine Gill, his mother. As a child, she said, “he would get money from those scratch tickets that people didn’t know they’d won. People would throw them on the ground…A lot of times there was still money on them.”
Mr. Gill’s online persona—he goes by “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube—has drawn tens of thousands of fans and copycats who share screenshots of their own brokerage accounts. As the GameStop frenzy peaked this week, hundreds of thousands of new investors downloaded applications like Robinhood to join the action, according to Apptopia Inc.
How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyYOU MAY ALSO LIKEUP NEXT0:00 / 4:144:14How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyWall Street is in an uproar over GameStop shares this week, after members of Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets forum encouraged bets on the video game retailer. WSJ explains how options trading is driving the action and what’s at stake.Mr. Gill said he wasn’t a rabble-rouser out to take on the establishment, just someone who believes investors can find value in unloved stocks. He never expected to have a legion of fans debating his identity online, or millions of dollars in his trading account, he said. He was just a dad with an online hobby and a plastic kiddie slide on the front lawn of a Boston suburb.
Mr. Gill began investing in GameStop around June 2019, he said, when it was hovering around $5 a share. Earlier that year, the game retailer was hunting for its fifth chief executive in a little over 12 months. Mr. Gill kept buying. Although he never played much besides Super Mario or Donkey Kong, he saw potential for the struggling retailer to reinvigorate itself by attracting new customers with the latest videogame consoles.
“People were doing a quick take, saying GameStop was the next Blockbuster, ” he said, a chain caught in a retail decline. “It appeared many folks just weren’t digging in deeper. It was a gross misclassification of the opportunity.”
Mr. Gill, tall with shoulder-length hair, opened a YouTube channel last summer, and he worked in the basement of the home he rents in Wilmington, Mass., to avoid disturbing his daughter after bedtime, he said. On his channel, he touted GameStop and Belgian beers. His favorite is Delirium Tremens.
On a recent YouTube live-stream, he wore a red headband and aviator sunglasses while fielding questions on stocks. He poured himself Prosecco then switched to beer as he celebrated big gains and gave shout-outs to legions of viewers and traders in a seven-hour-plus extravaganza. The stream has tallied more than 200,000 views.
Mr. Gill’s obscene username on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum is supposed to reflect a belief in value investing—buying shares of companies that are inexpensive relative to the underlying business.
Among his many Reddit fans, Mr. Gill “will go down as the greatest legend in the history of WallStreetBets,” said Jon Hagedorn, a 34-year-old training supervisor based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. “He’s the original OG.”
The stock’s wild ride, seemingly divorced from standard measures of corporate value, has spurred complaints that investors banding together to provoke this kind of frenzy amounts to market manipulation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday it would “act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity.” Mr. Gill said he hasn’t heard from the SEC.
Fast times
“The first thing that I had asked him when this craziness started was: is this illegal or anything dishonest? He said, ‘No mom, it’s not,’” recalled Ms. Gill, who lives in Brockton, Mass., where she and Steve Gill raised their son.
In high school, Mr. Gill was a distance runner, and he earned national honors on the team at nearby Stonehill College, where he graduated in 2009 with an accounting major. He ran a four-minute mile until sidelined by an Achilles injury.
Mr. Gill moved to New Hampshire for a few years and found a mentor, an investor and software developer his aunt introduced him to. He holds a designation as a Chartered Financial Analyst and said he was drawn by the complexity and challenge of stock picking, which became an outlet for the energy he once put into running. He started working at MassMutual in 2019.
A notebook with notes on stocks and an '8 Ball' toy that Keith Gill uses in his video streams. At the end of his YouTube stream, Mr. Gill and his viewers ask questions of the '8 Ball' about how a stock will perform.In the summer of 2019, he started building his position in GameStop and would post screenshots of his E*Trade account’s options positions on WallStreetBets forum. “Holy s— bro, what made you drop 53K on GameStop?” one trader posted about one of Mr. Gill’s screenshots in September 2019.
In the months that followed, he posted regularly, putting up a “GME YOLO update,” a reference to GameStop’s ticker and the mantra “you only live once.” He showed off gains in the five- and six-digits, and times when his investments plunged.
Mr. Gill stuck with GameStop, and his wagers became day-trader lore.
To fans, he tapped into the desire by millions of amateur investors around the U.S. to try their hand at stock trading. Trading fees have fallen to zero, and apps allow investors to buy and sell on their phones. The easy market access is augmented by an online community swelled with eager helpers.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Did you join in the trading frenzy this week?Join the conversation below.
Many first-time investors stuck at home in the pandemic said they found solace in chatting with others online about trading stocks or options, as well as hearing from those making profitable bets.
The discourse isn’t always positive. An off-Reddit chat room associated with WallStreetBets is filled with obscenity, racism and antigay screeds. Many on the platforms lash out against Wall Street power players, and some express a desire to see the financial pros reel from losses.
“I’m not out for anybody,” Mr. Gill said. “Roaring Kitty was an educational channel where I was showcasing my investment philosophy.”
Bear bust
Many on Wall Street disagreed with Mr. Gill’s bullish view on GameStop and have taken a big hit as a result. Hedge funds and other investment professionals piled into wagers that the shares would tumble.
To bet against a stock, hedge funds borrow shares and sell them, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price and return them. That allows them to pocket the difference between the prices. But when a shorted stock stages such a dramatic rally, it turns painful, often forcing them to exit from the positions by purchasing shares at a loss. In turn, that can inspire sharp gains in stocks, known as a “short squeeze.”
The bearish positioning of hedge funds was part of what drew many small GameStop investors, anticipating a short squeeze. Mr. Gill said his investing strategy didn’t entirely depend on a short squeeze, but he knew others were potentially betting on it.
So far, the professionals have been wrong, giving a win to Mr. Gill and other individual investors who bet big on GameStop. Hedge funds like Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital were the ones burned, as well as jeered by boastful Reddit investors.
Many others have piled into GameStop, trying to ride the rally “to the moon,” as many Reddit investors say. Individual investors have also piled into shares of companies like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. in the hopes of catching similar momentum and making a quick buck.
GameStop has garnered hundreds of thousands of posts over the past month across Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, according to data this week from Meltwater, a global media intelligence company. As the stock has vaulted higher, its shares have traded in a frenzy, making it one of the most popular bets in the U.S. market in recent days, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Keith Gill at his basement work station in Wilmington, Mass.
Seasoned traders are starting to take into account the behavior of influential investors like Mr. Gill and others.
Mark Sebastian, founder of Chicago-based Options Pit and an options trader for around 20 years, has developed a screener analyzing reams of stocks to spot those with heavy activity from individual investors. He buys or sells options based on which stocks are gaining momentum, trying to ride the wave higher or lower. Recently, this included AMC, though he said he wasn’t a fan.
“We’re trying to get on these names before they completely take off,” Mr. Sebastian said, calling one recent trade “free money.”
Mr. Gill said his life has changed overnight and hasn’t set his future plans. He would like to continue the “Roaring Kitty” YouTube channel, maybe buy a house. “I thought this trade would be successful,” he said, “but I never expected what happened over the past week.”
He has one dream in mind. “I always wanted to build an indoor track facility or a field house in Brockton,” he said of his hometown. “And now, it looks like I actually could do that.”
As far as sticking it to the man not being his original concern, that’s great, but for many that bought in that seems to be the whole point after browsing the Reddit for an hour.Scio me nihil scire
There are no kings inside the gates of eden0 -
Yeah sure, but if you are able to quit a job and day trade, you have substantial liquid cash to start. People livign paycheck to paycheck cannot do such a thing. And yes, you're right, it's about sticking it to the man now. But unless you sell at a profit, which plenty will not, it still seems counterproductive.static111 said:
Sounds like amateur makes good story. What was his portfolio several years ago? I didn’t see that in the story. I’m not anti wealth. If the guy went from 70k-100k a year at a sit down job and created millions with his hobby that is great. If he had millions to begin with that’s a different story.mrussel1 said:Teh man who drove the GME mania on WBS sat down with the WSJ. He has $33 million in his Etrade account, across multiple portfolios. Like I've been saying, this isn't rich vs the poor. https://www.wsj.com/articles/keith-gill-drove-the-gamestop-reddit-mania-he-talked-to-the-journal-11611931696The investor who helped direct the world’s attention to GameStop, leading a horde of online followers in a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next, says he’s just a normal guy.
“I didn’t expect this,” said Keith Gill, 34 years old, known as “DeepF—ingValue” by fans on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum and “Dada” by his 2-year-old daughter. He said he didn’t set out to draw the attention of Congress, the Federal Reserve, hedge funds, the media, trading platforms and hundreds of thousands of investors.
“This story is so much bigger than me,” Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock market game. “I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement.”
To many of them, Mr. Gill—who until recently worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.—is the force behind the triple-digit gains in shares of the videogame retailer GameStop, up more than 900% this year through Thursday. On Wednesday, the stock jumped 135% to $347.51, a record, before plunging to $194 a share Thursday as online brokerages clamped down. At the start of the year, GameStop shares went for around $18.
Many online investors say his advocacy helped turn them into a force powerful enough to cause big losses for established hedge funds and, for the moment, turn the investing world upside down.
Mr. Gill posted a screenshot of his brokerage account Wednesday, showing a roughly $20 million daily gain on GameStop shares and options. “Your steady hand convinced many of us to not only buy, but hold. Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people. Seriously thank you. You deserve every penny,” replied one Reddit user, reality_czech.
Online traders credit Mr. Gill with helping power the GameStop frenzy this week.
The next day, Mr. Gill posted another screenshot—showing about a $15 million loss. After Thursday’s market close, his E*Trade brokerage account, viewed by the Journal, held around $33 million, including GameStop stock, options and millions in cash.
“He always liked money,” said Elaine Gill, his mother. As a child, she said, “he would get money from those scratch tickets that people didn’t know they’d won. People would throw them on the ground…A lot of times there was still money on them.”
Mr. Gill’s online persona—he goes by “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube—has drawn tens of thousands of fans and copycats who share screenshots of their own brokerage accounts. As the GameStop frenzy peaked this week, hundreds of thousands of new investors downloaded applications like Robinhood to join the action, according to Apptopia Inc.
How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyYOU MAY ALSO LIKEUP NEXT0:00 / 4:144:14How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyWall Street is in an uproar over GameStop shares this week, after members of Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets forum encouraged bets on the video game retailer. WSJ explains how options trading is driving the action and what’s at stake.Mr. Gill said he wasn’t a rabble-rouser out to take on the establishment, just someone who believes investors can find value in unloved stocks. He never expected to have a legion of fans debating his identity online, or millions of dollars in his trading account, he said. He was just a dad with an online hobby and a plastic kiddie slide on the front lawn of a Boston suburb.
Mr. Gill began investing in GameStop around June 2019, he said, when it was hovering around $5 a share. Earlier that year, the game retailer was hunting for its fifth chief executive in a little over 12 months. Mr. Gill kept buying. Although he never played much besides Super Mario or Donkey Kong, he saw potential for the struggling retailer to reinvigorate itself by attracting new customers with the latest videogame consoles.
“People were doing a quick take, saying GameStop was the next Blockbuster, ” he said, a chain caught in a retail decline. “It appeared many folks just weren’t digging in deeper. It was a gross misclassification of the opportunity.”
Mr. Gill, tall with shoulder-length hair, opened a YouTube channel last summer, and he worked in the basement of the home he rents in Wilmington, Mass., to avoid disturbing his daughter after bedtime, he said. On his channel, he touted GameStop and Belgian beers. His favorite is Delirium Tremens.
On a recent YouTube live-stream, he wore a red headband and aviator sunglasses while fielding questions on stocks. He poured himself Prosecco then switched to beer as he celebrated big gains and gave shout-outs to legions of viewers and traders in a seven-hour-plus extravaganza. The stream has tallied more than 200,000 views.
Mr. Gill’s obscene username on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum is supposed to reflect a belief in value investing—buying shares of companies that are inexpensive relative to the underlying business.
Among his many Reddit fans, Mr. Gill “will go down as the greatest legend in the history of WallStreetBets,” said Jon Hagedorn, a 34-year-old training supervisor based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. “He’s the original OG.”
The stock’s wild ride, seemingly divorced from standard measures of corporate value, has spurred complaints that investors banding together to provoke this kind of frenzy amounts to market manipulation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday it would “act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity.” Mr. Gill said he hasn’t heard from the SEC.
Fast times
“The first thing that I had asked him when this craziness started was: is this illegal or anything dishonest? He said, ‘No mom, it’s not,’” recalled Ms. Gill, who lives in Brockton, Mass., where she and Steve Gill raised their son.
In high school, Mr. Gill was a distance runner, and he earned national honors on the team at nearby Stonehill College, where he graduated in 2009 with an accounting major. He ran a four-minute mile until sidelined by an Achilles injury.
Mr. Gill moved to New Hampshire for a few years and found a mentor, an investor and software developer his aunt introduced him to. He holds a designation as a Chartered Financial Analyst and said he was drawn by the complexity and challenge of stock picking, which became an outlet for the energy he once put into running. He started working at MassMutual in 2019.
A notebook with notes on stocks and an '8 Ball' toy that Keith Gill uses in his video streams. At the end of his YouTube stream, Mr. Gill and his viewers ask questions of the '8 Ball' about how a stock will perform.In the summer of 2019, he started building his position in GameStop and would post screenshots of his E*Trade account’s options positions on WallStreetBets forum. “Holy s— bro, what made you drop 53K on GameStop?” one trader posted about one of Mr. Gill’s screenshots in September 2019.
In the months that followed, he posted regularly, putting up a “GME YOLO update,” a reference to GameStop’s ticker and the mantra “you only live once.” He showed off gains in the five- and six-digits, and times when his investments plunged.
Mr. Gill stuck with GameStop, and his wagers became day-trader lore.
To fans, he tapped into the desire by millions of amateur investors around the U.S. to try their hand at stock trading. Trading fees have fallen to zero, and apps allow investors to buy and sell on their phones. The easy market access is augmented by an online community swelled with eager helpers.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Did you join in the trading frenzy this week?Join the conversation below.
Many first-time investors stuck at home in the pandemic said they found solace in chatting with others online about trading stocks or options, as well as hearing from those making profitable bets.
The discourse isn’t always positive. An off-Reddit chat room associated with WallStreetBets is filled with obscenity, racism and antigay screeds. Many on the platforms lash out against Wall Street power players, and some express a desire to see the financial pros reel from losses.
“I’m not out for anybody,” Mr. Gill said. “Roaring Kitty was an educational channel where I was showcasing my investment philosophy.”
Bear bust
Many on Wall Street disagreed with Mr. Gill’s bullish view on GameStop and have taken a big hit as a result. Hedge funds and other investment professionals piled into wagers that the shares would tumble.
To bet against a stock, hedge funds borrow shares and sell them, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price and return them. That allows them to pocket the difference between the prices. But when a shorted stock stages such a dramatic rally, it turns painful, often forcing them to exit from the positions by purchasing shares at a loss. In turn, that can inspire sharp gains in stocks, known as a “short squeeze.”
The bearish positioning of hedge funds was part of what drew many small GameStop investors, anticipating a short squeeze. Mr. Gill said his investing strategy didn’t entirely depend on a short squeeze, but he knew others were potentially betting on it.
So far, the professionals have been wrong, giving a win to Mr. Gill and other individual investors who bet big on GameStop. Hedge funds like Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital were the ones burned, as well as jeered by boastful Reddit investors.
Many others have piled into GameStop, trying to ride the rally “to the moon,” as many Reddit investors say. Individual investors have also piled into shares of companies like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. in the hopes of catching similar momentum and making a quick buck.
GameStop has garnered hundreds of thousands of posts over the past month across Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, according to data this week from Meltwater, a global media intelligence company. As the stock has vaulted higher, its shares have traded in a frenzy, making it one of the most popular bets in the U.S. market in recent days, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Keith Gill at his basement work station in Wilmington, Mass.
Seasoned traders are starting to take into account the behavior of influential investors like Mr. Gill and others.
Mark Sebastian, founder of Chicago-based Options Pit and an options trader for around 20 years, has developed a screener analyzing reams of stocks to spot those with heavy activity from individual investors. He buys or sells options based on which stocks are gaining momentum, trying to ride the wave higher or lower. Recently, this included AMC, though he said he wasn’t a fan.
“We’re trying to get on these names before they completely take off,” Mr. Sebastian said, calling one recent trade “free money.”
Mr. Gill said his life has changed overnight and hasn’t set his future plans. He would like to continue the “Roaring Kitty” YouTube channel, maybe buy a house. “I thought this trade would be successful,” he said, “but I never expected what happened over the past week.”
He has one dream in mind. “I always wanted to build an indoor track facility or a field house in Brockton,” he said of his hometown. “And now, it looks like I actually could do that.”
As far as sticking it to the man not being his original concern, that’s great, but for many that bought in that seems to be the whole point after browsing the Reddit for an hour.
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I just think the whole thing is fascinating, and like every other weird thing that happens here in the USA don’t expect it to be the last occurrence.mrussel1 said:
Yeah sure, but if you are able to quit a job and day trade, you have substantial liquid cash to start. People livign paycheck to paycheck cannot do such a thing. And yes, you're right, it's about sticking it to the man now. But unless you sell at a profit, which plenty will not, it still seems counterproductive.static111 said:
Sounds like amateur makes good story. What was his portfolio several years ago? I didn’t see that in the story. I’m not anti wealth. If the guy went from 70k-100k a year at a sit down job and created millions with his hobby that is great. If he had millions to begin with that’s a different story.mrussel1 said:Teh man who drove the GME mania on WBS sat down with the WSJ. He has $33 million in his Etrade account, across multiple portfolios. Like I've been saying, this isn't rich vs the poor. https://www.wsj.com/articles/keith-gill-drove-the-gamestop-reddit-mania-he-talked-to-the-journal-11611931696The investor who helped direct the world’s attention to GameStop, leading a horde of online followers in a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next, says he’s just a normal guy.
“I didn’t expect this,” said Keith Gill, 34 years old, known as “DeepF—ingValue” by fans on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum and “Dada” by his 2-year-old daughter. He said he didn’t set out to draw the attention of Congress, the Federal Reserve, hedge funds, the media, trading platforms and hundreds of thousands of investors.
“This story is so much bigger than me,” Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock market game. “I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement.”
To many of them, Mr. Gill—who until recently worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.—is the force behind the triple-digit gains in shares of the videogame retailer GameStop, up more than 900% this year through Thursday. On Wednesday, the stock jumped 135% to $347.51, a record, before plunging to $194 a share Thursday as online brokerages clamped down. At the start of the year, GameStop shares went for around $18.
Many online investors say his advocacy helped turn them into a force powerful enough to cause big losses for established hedge funds and, for the moment, turn the investing world upside down.
Mr. Gill posted a screenshot of his brokerage account Wednesday, showing a roughly $20 million daily gain on GameStop shares and options. “Your steady hand convinced many of us to not only buy, but hold. Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people. Seriously thank you. You deserve every penny,” replied one Reddit user, reality_czech.
Online traders credit Mr. Gill with helping power the GameStop frenzy this week.
The next day, Mr. Gill posted another screenshot—showing about a $15 million loss. After Thursday’s market close, his E*Trade brokerage account, viewed by the Journal, held around $33 million, including GameStop stock, options and millions in cash.
“He always liked money,” said Elaine Gill, his mother. As a child, she said, “he would get money from those scratch tickets that people didn’t know they’d won. People would throw them on the ground…A lot of times there was still money on them.”
Mr. Gill’s online persona—he goes by “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube—has drawn tens of thousands of fans and copycats who share screenshots of their own brokerage accounts. As the GameStop frenzy peaked this week, hundreds of thousands of new investors downloaded applications like Robinhood to join the action, according to Apptopia Inc.
How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyYOU MAY ALSO LIKEUP NEXT0:00 / 4:144:14How Options-Trading Redditors Fed the GameStop FrenzyWall Street is in an uproar over GameStop shares this week, after members of Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets forum encouraged bets on the video game retailer. WSJ explains how options trading is driving the action and what’s at stake.Mr. Gill said he wasn’t a rabble-rouser out to take on the establishment, just someone who believes investors can find value in unloved stocks. He never expected to have a legion of fans debating his identity online, or millions of dollars in his trading account, he said. He was just a dad with an online hobby and a plastic kiddie slide on the front lawn of a Boston suburb.
Mr. Gill began investing in GameStop around June 2019, he said, when it was hovering around $5 a share. Earlier that year, the game retailer was hunting for its fifth chief executive in a little over 12 months. Mr. Gill kept buying. Although he never played much besides Super Mario or Donkey Kong, he saw potential for the struggling retailer to reinvigorate itself by attracting new customers with the latest videogame consoles.
“People were doing a quick take, saying GameStop was the next Blockbuster, ” he said, a chain caught in a retail decline. “It appeared many folks just weren’t digging in deeper. It was a gross misclassification of the opportunity.”
Mr. Gill, tall with shoulder-length hair, opened a YouTube channel last summer, and he worked in the basement of the home he rents in Wilmington, Mass., to avoid disturbing his daughter after bedtime, he said. On his channel, he touted GameStop and Belgian beers. His favorite is Delirium Tremens.
On a recent YouTube live-stream, he wore a red headband and aviator sunglasses while fielding questions on stocks. He poured himself Prosecco then switched to beer as he celebrated big gains and gave shout-outs to legions of viewers and traders in a seven-hour-plus extravaganza. The stream has tallied more than 200,000 views.
Mr. Gill’s obscene username on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum is supposed to reflect a belief in value investing—buying shares of companies that are inexpensive relative to the underlying business.
Among his many Reddit fans, Mr. Gill “will go down as the greatest legend in the history of WallStreetBets,” said Jon Hagedorn, a 34-year-old training supervisor based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. “He’s the original OG.”
The stock’s wild ride, seemingly divorced from standard measures of corporate value, has spurred complaints that investors banding together to provoke this kind of frenzy amounts to market manipulation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday it would “act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity.” Mr. Gill said he hasn’t heard from the SEC.
Fast times
“The first thing that I had asked him when this craziness started was: is this illegal or anything dishonest? He said, ‘No mom, it’s not,’” recalled Ms. Gill, who lives in Brockton, Mass., where she and Steve Gill raised their son.
In high school, Mr. Gill was a distance runner, and he earned national honors on the team at nearby Stonehill College, where he graduated in 2009 with an accounting major. He ran a four-minute mile until sidelined by an Achilles injury.
Mr. Gill moved to New Hampshire for a few years and found a mentor, an investor and software developer his aunt introduced him to. He holds a designation as a Chartered Financial Analyst and said he was drawn by the complexity and challenge of stock picking, which became an outlet for the energy he once put into running. He started working at MassMutual in 2019.
A notebook with notes on stocks and an '8 Ball' toy that Keith Gill uses in his video streams. At the end of his YouTube stream, Mr. Gill and his viewers ask questions of the '8 Ball' about how a stock will perform.In the summer of 2019, he started building his position in GameStop and would post screenshots of his E*Trade account’s options positions on WallStreetBets forum. “Holy s— bro, what made you drop 53K on GameStop?” one trader posted about one of Mr. Gill’s screenshots in September 2019.
In the months that followed, he posted regularly, putting up a “GME YOLO update,” a reference to GameStop’s ticker and the mantra “you only live once.” He showed off gains in the five- and six-digits, and times when his investments plunged.
Mr. Gill stuck with GameStop, and his wagers became day-trader lore.
To fans, he tapped into the desire by millions of amateur investors around the U.S. to try their hand at stock trading. Trading fees have fallen to zero, and apps allow investors to buy and sell on their phones. The easy market access is augmented by an online community swelled with eager helpers.
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Many first-time investors stuck at home in the pandemic said they found solace in chatting with others online about trading stocks or options, as well as hearing from those making profitable bets.
The discourse isn’t always positive. An off-Reddit chat room associated with WallStreetBets is filled with obscenity, racism and antigay screeds. Many on the platforms lash out against Wall Street power players, and some express a desire to see the financial pros reel from losses.
“I’m not out for anybody,” Mr. Gill said. “Roaring Kitty was an educational channel where I was showcasing my investment philosophy.”
Bear bust
Many on Wall Street disagreed with Mr. Gill’s bullish view on GameStop and have taken a big hit as a result. Hedge funds and other investment professionals piled into wagers that the shares would tumble.
To bet against a stock, hedge funds borrow shares and sell them, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price and return them. That allows them to pocket the difference between the prices. But when a shorted stock stages such a dramatic rally, it turns painful, often forcing them to exit from the positions by purchasing shares at a loss. In turn, that can inspire sharp gains in stocks, known as a “short squeeze.”
The bearish positioning of hedge funds was part of what drew many small GameStop investors, anticipating a short squeeze. Mr. Gill said his investing strategy didn’t entirely depend on a short squeeze, but he knew others were potentially betting on it.
So far, the professionals have been wrong, giving a win to Mr. Gill and other individual investors who bet big on GameStop. Hedge funds like Melvin Capital Management and Maplelane Capital were the ones burned, as well as jeered by boastful Reddit investors.
Many others have piled into GameStop, trying to ride the rally “to the moon,” as many Reddit investors say. Individual investors have also piled into shares of companies like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. in the hopes of catching similar momentum and making a quick buck.
GameStop has garnered hundreds of thousands of posts over the past month across Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, according to data this week from Meltwater, a global media intelligence company. As the stock has vaulted higher, its shares have traded in a frenzy, making it one of the most popular bets in the U.S. market in recent days, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Keith Gill at his basement work station in Wilmington, Mass.
Seasoned traders are starting to take into account the behavior of influential investors like Mr. Gill and others.
Mark Sebastian, founder of Chicago-based Options Pit and an options trader for around 20 years, has developed a screener analyzing reams of stocks to spot those with heavy activity from individual investors. He buys or sells options based on which stocks are gaining momentum, trying to ride the wave higher or lower. Recently, this included AMC, though he said he wasn’t a fan.
“We’re trying to get on these names before they completely take off,” Mr. Sebastian said, calling one recent trade “free money.”
Mr. Gill said his life has changed overnight and hasn’t set his future plans. He would like to continue the “Roaring Kitty” YouTube channel, maybe buy a house. “I thought this trade would be successful,” he said, “but I never expected what happened over the past week.”
He has one dream in mind. “I always wanted to build an indoor track facility or a field house in Brockton,” he said of his hometown. “And now, it looks like I actually could do that.”
As far as sticking it to the man not being his original concern, that’s great, but for many that bought in that seems to be the whole point after browsing the Reddit for an hour.Scio me nihil scire
There are no kings inside the gates of eden0 -
Robinhood and Citadel’s relationship comes into focus as Washington vows to examine stock-market moves
Trading firms at center of Reddit-fueled stock surges have worked closely to share users’ market data, build political influence
ByJan. 29, 2021 at 5:49 p.m. ESTRobinhood, the online trading app heralded by some as a democratizing force to empower small investors, has spent the past few years nurturing a close relationship with one of Wall Street’s biggest players and building ties with some of the most powerful institutions in Washington.
The Silicon Valley-based trading platform makes a large amount of revenue from Citadel Securities, a Chicago-based financial-services giant. Robinhood’s regulatory filings show the company charges large investment firms called “market makers” fees to access real-time information about which stocks its users are buying and selling, a practice some regulators and industry watchers have seen as a potential conflict of interest.
Robinhood routes more than half of its customer orders to Citadel, by far its largest market-making partner by volume, Robinhood disclosures show. The app also works with Virtu, G1 Execution Services, Wolverine and Two Sigma.
Robinhood’s relationships with these investment firms is likely to face new scrutiny after the online broker took the extraordinary step Thursday of limiting trading of certain stocks that were propelled to meteoric heights by conversations on Reddit message boards. After the trading halt, Reddit users accused Citadel and its billionaire founder, Ken Griffin, of pressuring Robinhood to limit trading of certain stocks, a move that may have prevented further losses for the short-sellers that lost billions betting against GameStop.
On Twitter and the Reddit forum Wallstreetbets, retail investors speculated that Robinhood had caved to pressure from its powerful business partner. Because the company does not charge its users any fees, a key part of Robinhood’s business model relies on Citadel and similar companies.
In a blog post Thursday afternoon, Robinhood strongly denied its move was influenced by the large investment firms it works with to execute trades. “This was a risk-management decision, and was not made on the direction of the market makers we route to,” the company wrote. A spokeswoman for Robinhood declined to comment on the company’s relationships with market makers.
Josh Zeitz, a spokesman for Citadel Securities, said in a statement that the company “has not instructed or otherwise caused any brokerage firm to stop, suspend, or limit trading or otherwise refuse to do business.”
Citadel LLC, a separate hedge fund also founded by Griffin, recently helped bail out Melvin Capital, a fund that sank 30 percent in a few weeks after shorting GameStop.
The events triggered a swift response from a wide range of lawmakers, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who said they supported an investigation of Robinhood’s decision to block trading in GameStop. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) announced that the House Financial Services Committee would hold a hearing to examine how the market “has been manipulated by hedge funds and their financial partners to benefit themselves while others pay the price.”
Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Ocasio-Cortez, told The Washington Post that the congresswoman believes “Citadel’s role needs to be examined.”
On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission said the agency was “closely monitoring” the stock-market volatility, which it said “has the potential to expose investors to rapid and severe losses and undermine market confidence.”
Robinhood announced it would allow “limited buys” of GameStop and other heavily shorted stocks to resume Friday, sending shares of GameStop soaring more than 70 percent.
Congress plans to examine Citadel’s agreement to obtain trading data from Robinhood in exchange for millions of dollars. These types of arrangements, called payments for “order flows,” have become more common in recent years and more lucrative during the pandemic trading boom of the past year. They have also drawn growing scrutiny from federal regulators who have raised concerns that they can hurt average investors.
Because of the GameStop frenzy, “the regulators have a chance to really examine what’s going on and get access to information about what these relationships really are like,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.
Robinhood and other brokerages cannot execute trades directly, so they usually work with market-making firms. Robinhood is required by law to work with market makers that can give their users the best market prices for a given trade. When Robinhood directs a transaction to one of these third parties, the market maker learns which security is being bought or sold before the trade happens.
Citadel and other market makers pay Robinhood a small fee for this privilege, which gives the market-making firms information about retail trading patterns. Citadel said it uses this information to improve its trading algorithms. Market makers also take a small profit on the “spread,” or difference in price between what a Robinhood user pays and the price at which the security is being sold in the market.
Robinhood generated $271 million from all order-flow payments in the first half of 2020, according to regulatory filings. Because it is a closely held company, Robinhood does not disclose how much of its total revenue comes from order-flow payments. A spokeswoman for Robinhood declined to comment on the company’s business model.
TD Ameritrade, another major online brokerage, generated about $560 million from those payments over the first half of 2020, but because the company makes money from other services, that represented only about one-fifth of its sales over that period.
Critics of these arrangements say they amount to a hidden tax on unsuspecting mom-and-pop investors. Democrat Carl Levin, a former senator representing Michigan, recently argued in an editorial for the Financial Times that the Biden administration should abolish the practice of order-flow payments.
Last month, Robinhood paid $65 million to settle a charge by the SEC related to its order-flow agreements. The federal agency found Robinhood had misled its users by failing to disclose the payments it received from investment firms and failing to find investment partners that offered the most competitive rates for executing trades.
At the time, Robinhood said in a statement that it has been fully transparent in its communications with customers about current revenue streams and that the settlement related to “historical practices that do not reflect Robinhood today.”
The new regulatory scrutiny around GameStop trading will test the political influence of two companies that have invested in building connections in Washington. Last year, Robinhood bulked up its regulatory staff, spent $275,000 lobbying the federal government and hired lobbyists with ties to a Wall Street regulator and congressional oversight committees, according to disclosure filings and an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Robinhood’s chief legal officer is Dan Gallagher, a Republican appointee to the SEC who served as a commissioner there from 2011 to 2015 and was known for his persistent criticism of the Dodd-Frank Act, financial regulation passed after the 2008 crisis. Beth Zorc, a lawyer who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration after roles as a senior aide to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, joined Robinhood late last year to help oversee its federal lobbying efforts.
“There’s a lot of hard competition, but the financial sector is one of the worst, most egregious areas for revolving door between government and regulated industry,” Weissman said.
Citadel spent $520,000 on lobbying in 2020 and counted a former Treasury Department employee and a former tax aide on Capitol Hill among its lobbyists.
Citadel also paid Janet Yellen, President Biden’s newly installed treasury secretary, between $710,000 and $760,000 in speaking fees in 2019 and 2020, according to her financial disclosure forms. When asked in a news briefing Thursday about the payments and whether Yellen would recuse herself from advising Biden on issues related to Robinhood, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it is normal for experts such as Yellen to be paid for advice while not actively serving in a government role.
“The secretary of treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy,” Psaki said. “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice.”
Citadel declined to comment on its lobbying or payments to Yellen.
Yellen said in her ethics agreement upon her nomination that she would seek written authorization before she participated “personally and substantially” in any matter involving Citadel or other financial firms she received speaking fees from.
Asked whether Yellen would seek that authorization, Treasury Department spokesman Calvin Mitchell did not respond directly. “Secretary Yellen of course will abide by her ethics pledge in all instances,” Mitchell said.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140 -
Meh. This is mostly conjecture that both parties deny. It should be investigated. It will be clear if they were under financial distress or not. Further, RH is incentived to make as many trades as possible. Their deal flow revenue isn't exactly immaterial. It's a primary revenue source along with the lending.0
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‘Is this really happening right now?’: A 10-year-old cashes in his GameStop shares
By Sydney Page
January 30 at 6:00 AM EST
The GameStop stock surge has benefited small-scale investors, many of them surprised at their unlikely windfalls. Perhaps none so much as a 10-year-old boy from San Antonio.
The fifth-grader was gifted 10 GameStop shares, each at $6.19, as a Kwanzaa present from his mother in December 2019. She bought the stock simply because her son liked to buy video games at the store and she wanted to teach him a little about the stock market.
In a matter of minutes this week, Jaydyn Carr became an unexpected beneficiary of the market mayhem, as his $60 stake in the video game retailer grew to $3,200.
“Is this really happening right now?” Jaydyn’s mother, Nina Carr, remembers asking herself. “I couldn’t believe it was true.”
[What you need to know about GameStop’s stock price chaos]
Carr, 31, was working in her home office on Wednesday when a slew of news alerts about GameStop’s Reddit-spurred surge started appearing on her phone. Her jaw dropped.
Once she absorbed the news, she sprinted to her son’s bedroom.
“I was so excited for him,” she said. In simple terms, she described to Jaydyn what happened to his GameStop shares and why they suddenly skyrocketed.
“She was saying that stocks hardly ever go up this way, so if I wanted to sell it, we should sell it now,” Jaydyn said.
Ultimately, the choice was his.
“It wouldn’t be fair for me to make the decision on his behalf,” Carr explained. Besides, she added, “if he lost the money, it would have been a lesson learned.”
So, she asked her only child the burning question: “Do you want to sell or stay?”
To her relief, Jaydyn decided to sell.
“I was so excited. I thought it wasn’t even reality,” Jaydyn said.
Carr then walked her son through the selling process, and he cashed out his shares. The plan is to put $2,200 in Jaydyn’s savings account and then invest the remaining $1,000 as a mother-son team.
[EXPLAINER: Why GameStop’s stock surge is shaking Wall Street]
When Carr bought the 10 GameStop shares in 2019 as a Kwanzaa gift, she certainly did not anticipate the value would one day spontaneously soar, she said. Her sole intention in purchasing the stock was to teach her then-eight-year-old son about Ujamaa, which means, “cooperative economics.” It’s one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
“The goal was to ensure he knows the value of a dollar and how to manage money,” Carr said, explaining that Ujamaa is the idea of sharing wealth while also strengthening personal finances and self-reliance.
Beyond relating the gift to the deeper meaning of the holiday, Carr said that since Jaydyn’s father passed away in February 2014, it has been a priority for her to educate her son about money management.
“I am very frugal, and saving is a big part of what I do. Being the only parent, I want to set a good example for him,” she said. “I got into finance when his dad passed away. I wanted to make sure his future was in good hands.”
According to Jaydyn, he has already learned a lot from his mom: “She is always teaching me what to do in emergencies in life and how to save money to one day buy a car and a house,” he said.
Carr — who is a public health nutritionist and runs her own business — felt the gift was an opportunity to reinforce the importance of investments, she said.
As for deciding which company to invest in, the choice was obvious: Jaydyn is a video game enthusiast, so “we were always in and out of GameStop, constantly getting different video games,” Carr explained. “I thought, ‘How can I mix our principles of Kwanzaa with something I know he really wants?’ ”
In an effort to ensure her son still had a proper present to open, “I had to figure out something to give this kid to unwrap,” she recalled. “I printed out a template and filled in his information, put it in a picture frame, and wrapped it up.”
While the gift may not have been the Xbox One he was hoping for, “he was definitely excited because it had GameStop’s name on it,” said Carr.
Plus, Jaydyn was especially jazzed after his mother explained to him that he owned a small portion of a company he loves.
More than two years later, the frame still sits in a place of honor in Jaydyn’s bedroom. Now, though, it carries new meaning — a memento of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
While market manipulation is not a new phenomenon, the “magnitude, scale and speed of this was unprecedented,” Veljko Fotak, a finance professor at the University of Buffalo, said.
[Reddit’s /r/wallstreetbets astronomical rise]
Although the scheme is problematic in many ways, Fotak said, “I think the more kids learn and the more they understand the markets, the better equipped they are to plan for their own retirement, and the better off we are as a society.”
For Jaydyn, this is just the beginning. He has already got big plans: “I am now looking for companies that pay dividends,” he said confidently.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140 -
That's a great story. Good for them.0
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This whole stock market think is really sad to me. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm very good at maintaining a budget, loose enough with my money to have some fun, frugal enough and have a wife who dabbles in investing such that we live surprisingly well for two people who have a less than average income. But what bugs me is that a) most people are more like me rather than my wife (who, if it mattered more to her and if she had a husband who was good at earning a lot of money could make us rich, rich, rich), and those people find the stock market and investing both confusing as hell and mind numbing in it's abstract details and b) are just trying to get by and don't have the time or resources to play these games. So the more fortunate/ left-brained/ finance and detail oriented among us prosper and the rest are just struggling and desperate and maybe even jumping off bridges. This is especially true for creative people- musicians and artists and writers- who find all this fixation with wealth and finance to be soul killing. What a fucking weird world this is.
"It's a sad and beautiful world"-Roberto Benigni0 -
I feel the stock market is actually pretty straight forward when it comes to investing. If you invest in blue chip stocks, mutual funds, index funds, you will definitely make money over time. The difficult and confusing part comes when you try to play the market. Shorting, day trading, options, puts etc.. high risk, high reward. I studied and practiced through paper trading for almost a year before I traded. I’ve taken all my gains and become mostly a dividend/ passive income trader. But I still jump into the madness sometimes when I see a good short squeeze like GME. There’s a ton of great videos explaining the basics of the market. Just stay away from the “buy this stock now!” Or “the next Amazon!” Type videos.brianlux said:This whole stock market think is really sad to me. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm very good at maintaining a budget, loose enough with my money to have some fun, frugal enough and have a wife who dabbles in investing such that we live surprisingly well for two people who have a less than average income. But what bugs me is that a) most people are more like me rather than my wife (who, if it mattered more to her and if she had a husband who was good at earning a lot of money could make us rich, rich, rich), and those people find the stock market and investing both confusing as hell and mind numbing in it's abstract details and b) are just trying to get by and don't have the time or resources to play these games. So the more fortunate/ left-brained/ finance and detail oriented among us prosper and the rest are just struggling and desperate and maybe even jumping off bridges. This is especially true for creative people- musicians and artists and writers- who find all this fixation with wealth and finance to be soul killing. What a fucking weird world this is.0 -
I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.0
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i haven't seen the news since friday. is the stonks thing still going? feels like month ago, but it was only last week."You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."0 -
hopefully it works out and in a week you are not using the "not stonks"meme.tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens."You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."0 -
Good luck. GME is in the shitter. People are exiting. This has been institutional from the start, manipulation all the way. I think when the data is analyzed, you'll see it was the big dogs driving the short squeeze. And all of this political yelling will fade away.....................tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.0 -
gimmesometruth27 said:
hopefully it works out and in a week you are not using the "not stonks"meme.tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
There are a ton of the "little people" going to be buying this when it goes down as low as $6 a share. The plan is to buy as much as you can and hold.mrussel1 said:
Good luck. GME is in the shitter. People are exiting. This has been institutional from the start, manipulation all the way. I think when the data is analyzed, you'll see it was the big dogs driving the short squeeze. And all of this political yelling will fade away.....................tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
I'm out a grand if it doesn't work. If the people do what they did on Gamestop then I'll be singing a different tune, lol.0 -
Certainly the financial risk is low if it's a grand. But I still don't understand what the future is for GME. They could have bought up a game streaming service (ala Steam) a few years ago, but Amazon pulled the trigger, not them. Instead they bought cell phone stores (WTF?) and then started jettisoning them within a few years. It's just a poorly managed company with no obvious future if it's all brick and mortar.tempo_n_groove said:gimmesometruth27 said:
hopefully it works out and in a week you are not using the "not stonks"meme.tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
There are a ton of the "little people" going to be buying this when it goes down as low as $6 a share. The plan is to buy as much as you can and hold.mrussel1 said:
Good luck. GME is in the shitter. People are exiting. This has been institutional from the start, manipulation all the way. I think when the data is analyzed, you'll see it was the big dogs driving the short squeeze. And all of this political yelling will fade away.....................tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
I'm out a grand if it doesn't work. If the people do what they did on Gamestop then I'll be singing a different tune, lol.0 -
I'm totally in it for the short run. ZERO long term investment here.mrussel1 said:
Certainly the financial risk is low if it's a grand. But I still don't understand what the future is for GME. They could have bought up a game streaming service (ala Steam) a few years ago, but Amazon pulled the trigger, not them. Instead they bought cell phone stores (WTF?) and then started jettisoning them within a few years. It's just a poorly managed company with no obvious future if it's all brick and mortar.tempo_n_groove said:gimmesometruth27 said:
hopefully it works out and in a week you are not using the "not stonks"meme.tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
There are a ton of the "little people" going to be buying this when it goes down as low as $6 a share. The plan is to buy as much as you can and hold.mrussel1 said:
Good luck. GME is in the shitter. People are exiting. This has been institutional from the start, manipulation all the way. I think when the data is analyzed, you'll see it was the big dogs driving the short squeeze. And all of this political yelling will fade away.....................tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
I'm out a grand if it doesn't work. If the people do what they did on Gamestop then I'll be singing a different tune, lol.0 -
Yeah I was replying to your statement The plan is to buy as much as you can and hold.tempo_n_groove said:
I'm totally in it for the short run. ZERO long term investment here.mrussel1 said:
Certainly the financial risk is low if it's a grand. But I still don't understand what the future is for GME. They could have bought up a game streaming service (ala Steam) a few years ago, but Amazon pulled the trigger, not them. Instead they bought cell phone stores (WTF?) and then started jettisoning them within a few years. It's just a poorly managed company with no obvious future if it's all brick and mortar.tempo_n_groove said:gimmesometruth27 said:
hopefully it works out and in a week you are not using the "not stonks"meme.tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
There are a ton of the "little people" going to be buying this when it goes down as low as $6 a share. The plan is to buy as much as you can and hold.mrussel1 said:
Good luck. GME is in the shitter. People are exiting. This has been institutional from the start, manipulation all the way. I think when the data is analyzed, you'll see it was the big dogs driving the short squeeze. And all of this political yelling will fade away.....................tempo_n_groove said:I bought 100 shares of AMC. Let's see what happens.
I'm out a grand if it doesn't work. If the people do what they did on Gamestop then I'll be singing a different tune, lol.
I don't get that at all.
0
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