It’s not often that making a killing on Wall Street winds up being a boon for ‘Main Street’, but that’s what happened, beginning last week, when internet users began buying up shares of the sagging retail company GameStop on the stock market.
The ‘crowd-vesting’ strategy paid off for the Reddit users who had banded together against hedge fund titans by using a nontraditional disruptive trading tactic.
GameStop’s stock price went through the roof—from $43 to $325 in one week—leaving the Reddit band of Merry Men with a sizable profit, which inspired an idea of paying it forward.
Hunter Kahn, a 20-year-old Cornell University mechanical engineering student raked in close to $30,000 in GameStop profits. While the bulk of that windfall will be spent financing his education, Kahn also used part of his newfound stash o’ cash to purchase and donate Nintendo Switch games and consoles valued at $2,000 to a local children’s hospital.
“As a beneficiary of the recent events on Wall Street I think it is important that myself and others pay forward our good fortune,” Kahn posted to his Instagram.
“I am proud to announce my humble donation of 6 Nintendo Switches and games to go with them to the Children’s Minnesota Hospital.”
But, the ‘Robin Hood’ of the group might be maverick billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who was an early executive at Facebook. His initial $115,000 purchase of GameStop shares turned into a $500,000 payout, and he donated it all to the Barstool Fund, a new COVID-19 charity that gives cash payments to small businesses who are about to go out of business.
“I want to announce that I’m taking all the profits that I made plus my original position—so I’m gonna take $500,000—and I’m gonna donate to the Barstool Fund for small businesses,” Palihapitiya revealed during a segment on CNBC.
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While fortunes are made and lost on the stock market every day and no one can predict where the market will close when the final bell rings, this is just the kind of generous investing trend we’d love to be able to report about a whole lot more often.
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