A 20-year-old USC student did a little stock trading over the summer—and banked about $110 million for his trouble. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that Jake Freeman made the mind-boggling profit solely from his purchase and subsequent sale of Bed Bath & Beyond stock, reports MarketWatch. In short, Freeman bought 5 million shares of the company in July, when it was going for $5.50 per share. He sold his stake on Tuesday when it was going for as high as $28 per share. His initial outlay of $25 million—raised through family and friends—sold for more than $130 million this week, per Fortune.
“The significant appreciation of BBBY’s share price combined with the fact that I am leaving for school tomorrow played critical roles in closing the Position,” Freeman explained in a Reddit post. And as he put it to MarketWatch: “I did not expect the price to soar as it did." That Freeman wrote about his BBBY adventure on Reddit is key to the story: The chain morphed into a meme stock in recent weeks, notes the Guardian, referring to stocks "that soar independently of the success of a business, thanks to hype on message boards and social media." (Think GameStop.) On Thursday, BBBY was trading for under $20 per share.
An interview with the Financial Times fills in some background on Freeman, an applied mathematics and economics student at USC. He has interned at the hedge fund Volaris Capital but made the purchase through his own Freeman Capital Management fund. An uncle, Scott Freeman, is a former pharmaceuticals exec who helps manage the fund. "I am truly going to miss being able to say 'I am the second largest non-institutional shareholder of Bed Bath & Beyond,' but I am certainly going to be shopping at BBBY tomorrow," he wrote in his Reddit post. Freeman's first celebratory move with the windfall? He took his parents out to dinner in suburban New York City. (More Bed Bath & Beyond stories.)
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