Trading volume has surged in shares of GameStop, AMC Entertainment, as well as Bed Bath & Beyond and BlackBerry, stunning Wall Street firms betting that those stocks would fall.
MINNEAPOLIS – A college student donated Nintendo Switches and games to Children’s Minnesota Hospital after making money from his GameStop stocks.
Children’s Minnesota received a special gift from Hunter Kahn, a video creator and student attending Cornell University, according to his Instagram profile.
Hunter Kahn posing outside of Children’s Minnesota Hospital. (Credit: Hunter Kahn)
Kahn posted to his Instagram account saying that after being “a beneficiary of the recent events on Wall Street,” he felt it was important to pay his good fortune forward.
“I wanted my donations to be GameStop purchases since that is how this all started and there is no better group of people to receive a bunch of Switches than a bunch of kids going through a hard time,” Kahn told the hospital.
Hunter Kahn pictured with gifts for the child patients at Children’s Minnesota Hospital. (Hunter Kahn)
According to a hospital spokesperson, Kahn donated a plethora or games and electronic devices, including:
Nintendo Switches and games gifted by Hunter Kahn to Children’s Minnesota Hospital. (Credit: Hunter Kahn)
“We’re so grateful for this generous donation that will help bring joy to kids at our hospitals, especially during these challenging times. It’s inspiring to see young people in our community choosing to give back and pay it forward,” Jennifer Soderholm, president of Children’s Minnesota Foundation, wrote in an emailed statement.
In late January, trading volume surged in shares of GameStop, AMC Entertainment, as well as Bed Bath & Beyond and BlackBerry, stunning Wall Street firms betting that the value of those stocks would fall.
The surges came from small retail investors with trading accounts ranging from $500 to $2,500 banding together in an economic tug-of-war against major investment firms.
Among them was Roaring Kitty, a YouTube personality from a Boston suburb who became a legendary fixture on the Reddit forum, expressing an early interest in buying GameStop shares and inspiring a growing legion of followers to pore through its financials.
The Reddit-based investors used the chat platform Discord to fire each other up and the trading app Robinhood to buy shares with a few clicks on their smartphones. They soon found a shared enemy in hedge fund managers who tried to short the stock, encouraging each other to keep buying GameStop and push it ever higher —”to the moon.”
Intense media and Wall Street interest pushed many traders into these stocks late last week, with GameStop going as high as $483 last Thursday. They began trading this year at just over $17 a share.
Small-time investors who took a chance on the once-faltering gaming store stock made significant gains.
Jaydyn Carr, 10, of San Antonio, Texas, landed a boon by selling GameStop stock he was gifted more than a year ago.
Carr’s mother, Nina, spent $60 for 10 shares of the video game chain’s stock in December of 2019 that she gave him for Kwanzaa to reflect Ujamaa, one of the festival’s seven principles that focuses on cooperative economics.
With GameStop’s share price skyrocketing in the past week, Jaydyn sold the shares on Jan. 27 for a little less than $3,200, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
The Associated Press and Austin Williams contributed to this report.
