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“I actually never invested anything prior to playing Animal Crossing,” Fung says. “Unfortunately, many people are used to losing, and we definitely don’t mind losing toward a goal we believe in.” But her origin story as a stock trader began in a fairly forgiving market that made her a multimillionaire: the “stalk market” in Nintendo’s 2020 hit, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a bustling in-game exchange centered on a single commodity-turnips.
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“I think a lot of people don’t realize that my generation grew up during the 2008 financial crisis,” she says. The GameStop Stock Market Saga Explainer Dictionary Escaping Into the Soothing Grind of ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’įung’s investment mindset was forged by financial failure. “All I can do is hold with my diamond hands!” “I’m definitely losing money on all these shares right now, but I’m pretty detached and I’m not too worried about them,” she says. The 24-year-old Seattleite, who has a day job in property management, is a casual investor who doesn’t put more money in the stock market than she can comfortably afford to lose.
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She hitched a ride on the rusty rockets as they lifted off, and days later, she rode them down to earth as they ran out of Reddit fuel.įor Fung, who says she neither gained nor lost the riches that other eager traders did, the short-squeeze showdown between the behemoth hedge funds that had heavily shorted the faltering stocks and the crusading, app-equipped retail traders that banded together to thwart them-to oversimplify the situation in a screen-ready way-was a landmark moment but barely a blip in her bank account.
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She also invested in a trio of other well-past-their-peaks “meme stocks” that the subreddit sent soaring: AMC, Nokia, and BlackBerry. She purchased a share of GME on January 25, as the stock’s price started to spike, and gradually amassed more shares as it continued to climb. About a week before a failing chain of stores that sell video games became the stuff that several movies are made of, Angie Fung, a regular lurker on the WallStreetBets subreddit, learned that GameStop’s stock might be a buying opportunity.
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