Small investors have been touting their windfalls after the stock price of video game retailer GameStop soared last week.
Jaydyn Carr, 10, a fifth-grader from San Antonio, may be the smallest and most excited of them all.
Carr and his mother, Nina, spoke to NBC business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent on TODAY about how they turned $60 into just under $3,200 after investing in GameStop stock in 2019. The stock went on a wild ride last week fueled by a group of Reddit users and amateur investors.
The GameStop phenomenon has dominated Wall Street after small investors banded together to drive up the sagging stock price of the struggling retailer to make money while also sticking it to hedge funds and other firms that had shorted the stock, essentially betting on it to fail.
Nina Carr gifted her son 10 shares of GameStop in 2019 as a Kwanzaa present when it was worth about $6 a share, a story first reported by MySanAntonio.com.
"I know this kid loves video games, and at the time I was teaching him financial literacy," she told TODAY.
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"She was saying that I basically owned a small portion of the company," Jaydyn said.
Nina had alerts set up on her phone for GameStop, and last week they started incessantly pinging as the stock price kept going up.
"I saw the price and I was just like, 'There's no way this can be real,'" she said.
Jaydyn had some questions of his own when he was shown how high GameStop's stock price had risen.
"Ummm, why?!" he said before laughing.
Nina went to Jaydyn and asked him if he wanted to sell the stock.
"And I was probably stuttering and mumbling, trying to hurry up and explain this is unusual, this doesn't happen all the time, so yeah it was definitely a moment," Nina said.
Jaydyn decided to cash out, making a profit of more than $3,000.
"I've already saved $2,200 of it," he said. "And the rest of the $1,000 is gonna go to invest in more companies like Microsoft, Roblox and different companies."
The 10-year-old is one of many small investors celebrating their gains, from those who became instant millionaires to people like college student Daniel Lenois, who made $1,100 on GameStop and AMC Theatres stock last week.
"That's real money, that's money I could use to pay off my credit card, that I could keep in reserve in my savings account to pay for future semesters," Lenois said on TODAY Monday.
The GameStop phenomenon has lawmakers calling for a more transparent market open to individual investors.
"For years, the same hedge funds, private equity firms, and wealthy investors dismayed by the GameStop trades have treated the stock market like their own personal casino while everyone else pays the price," Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a news release. "It's long past time for the SEC and other financial regulators to wake up and do their jobs — and with a new administration and Democrats running Congress, I intend to make sure they do."
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
