Source: (Photo by Johnny Louis/Getty Images) / (Photo by Johnny Louis/Getty Images)
As the recent madness of the GameStop rally dies down, and investors now talk about a painful tumble, Jaydyn Carr appears to have beat the market and “get it while the gettin’ is good.” The ten-year-old San Antonio, TX native had watched an initial investment of about $60, given to him by his mother Nina two years ago, grow to a height of $3,200 before Jayden decided to cash out.
Seven years ago, Jaydyn’s father passed away due to complications suffered as an Army combat medic, and Nina took it upon herself to teach their son some of the lessons in financial literacy that she had to learn the hard way.
“In the African-American community, that’s a huge gap that I wanted to fill in,” she shared with the New York Times. “[Jaydyn]’s all I have left, he’s my legacy. I wish more parents would do it. I think it would definitely interrupt a debt cycle to teach your kids about financial responsibility.”
And so she got her son comfortable speaking with bank tellers, understanding what constitutes an “impulse buy,” and eventually, learning about the stock market. In December 2018, 8-year old Jaydyn was praying for an Xbox when his mother saw this as a moment to tie-in his love of games with the principle of ujamaa, or cooperative economics, one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa. “We were always there two years ago, just buying different video games,” she told CNN. “I was like, ‘I can give him the shares the GameStop and give him something tangible to hold on to and that way he can appreciate it that way.'”
Nina decided to purchase her son 10 shares of GameStop, then at $6.19 a share, and to print and frame the stock certificate for her son. She’d then set her phone to keep her notified of any changes to $GME, but wasn’t prepared for the surprise surges of the last few weeks. When she saw that shares had climbed to as high as $351 a share, she quickly pulled Jaydyn aside from his virtual learning class and asked what he wanted to do.
Jaydyn decided to sell his stock and walked away with $3,200. Since then, the young investor’s already started mapping out his next market strategy: save a little over $2,000 for himself and reinvest the remainder in Roblox, an online universe where the objective is for users to create other virtual games others to play with. The company was supposed to present its IPO in December, but it has since delayed the offering.
However, to hear Jaydyn tell it, he doesn’t mind – he’s playing the long game. “Long-term investing is important because that is how I got this money.”
