I Made $723 on GameStop After Losing $450
Investing to me is a joke and a meme
As an armchair investor who hopped on the Reddit bandwagon a bit too late, I felt like an idiot every time I opened my Robinhood app. I initially invested in GameStop (GME) on the night of the Super Bowl. The purchase went through when the stock opened at $72.41, and then I instantly lost $300. Even worse, I sold my Bitcoin (BTC), which had risen from $900 to $950, to buy GameStop stock. I put in an extra $50 for good measure just so I had $1000 in GME. This came on the same day Elon Musk announced he was buying $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, and the value of the cryptocurrency skyrocketed.
In short, I made a very stupid, idiotic move that trusted memes on Reddit more than any sound investing advice or even common sense. After instantly losing $300, I just kept losing more money. Once GME started to border on $40 per share, the price of my investment bordered $550, I was on the verge of losing $450, and I had to just stop checking my Robinhood app and just hope for the best. To my benefit, my life is busy enough, so not checking my stocks and investments for a whole day usually isn’t a problem.
I’m not an expert at investing anyway. I wasn’t expecting to make money on it.
However, yesterday afternoon, a Robinhood notification was showing my GME stock was skyrocketing. I refreshed it every couple of seconds after hours when I was done with work to see the stock surge by more than 100%. I eventually sold at $118, making a $723 net profit from my initial investment at around 4:45 p.m. But then I was kicking myself — that afternoon, GME hit almost $200 per share and maintained for most of Thursday at around $150.
I was kicking myself for selling early, but alas is my investing strategy to look like a good investor even though I know nothing — hold when you’re down, sell when you’re up a considerable amount. Of course, when you buy a stock too high, like I did, there’s a chance the stock never rises above the price you buy it at. Since I have only invested in cryptocurrency and GameStop, I have luckily not run into that problem.
15 days ago, I wrote about how I lost a lot of money investing in GameStop. But I was closely following the Reddit threads that urged me to hold.
“Of course, if my judgments of the r/wallstreetbets daily GME threads are correct, I could be writing a very different article a week or even a month from now. I’m certainly rooting for being able to write a whole different article a week from now,” I wrote.
I don’t mean to say I told you so…but yeah, I told you so. I held, and now two weeks after writing an article about losing $300 instantly, I’m writing about gaining $723 selling on the stock while it’s high. While I probably could have sold on more that afternoon, the stock was so volatile in my mind that I had to sell before it crashed. It didn’t crash, but I thought it could have.
Again, this article is not financial or investing advice since I’m not an expert. But winning instead of losing is a whole lot of fun. I’m not going to say “I made $723 through investing, and this is how you can too,” because that would be unsubstantiated, dangerous advice only through my anecdotal, non-expert experience.
Again, I only have less than one paycheck of money invested at a time, and the point is to keep it casual, not hedge all my finances on investing. I understand I’m privileged in having the financial stability to invest in the first place. I won’t use my savings, nor will I put money on more important things like rent, bills, utilities, and my graduate school tuition on investing. To a large degree, investing to me is like a joke, a meme, something my friends and I go back and forth about with no actual knowledge of what we’re doing. I’m glad Reddit turned it into that for me.
Investing to someone like me, a teacher by day, graduate student, writer and editor by night, is like playing a game of Candy Crush. Just because I have always made money from investing doesn’t mean I’m good at it. Sell when you’re up, and hold when you’re low isn’t expert advice — it’s common sense I stumbled upon out of pride in refusing to sell when I was down.
I just put $1000 of my $1723 of GameStop stock into Dogecoin, and I’m currently down 7.6% and $84. But I will hold. I pray Dogecoin will garner the attention of the Reddit community and possibly be the next GameStop. If not, I’ll hold until the amount my crypto stocks are worth exceeds the price I bought them for. Patience, for me, is the biggest virtue in investing.
Disclaimer: this article is purely for entertainment purposes and is not intended as financial advice. Please consult a financial advisor before you make any major investing or financial decisions.
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