PERSONALITIES: College student hits big in GameStop stock frenzy

Tim Leininger, Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Conn.
·5 min read

Oct. 29—In fall 2020, two University of Connecticut students from the Stafford Springs section of Stafford invested in a faltering retail business to raise a little bit of money that would fund a cross-country journey while attending classes remotely.

Joe Fonicello

Who he is: Investment consultant who, with his girlfriend Abbe Minor, is in the Netflix docuseries "Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga;" has a community investment website, gmedd.com.

Hometown: Stafford. Currently lives in San Diego.

Education: Earned a bachelor's degree in digital marketing and analytics from the University of Connecticut in 2021; Stafford High School graduate.

Growing up: Grew up on his parents' vegetable farm.

Quote: "I was really looking for something I could invest in. I didn't really expect to make much more than a few percentage points, but it ended up going a little crazy."

Little did they know they were one of the first people on a wild roller coaster that was the GameStop trading frenzy and which skyrocketed stock prices that profited them at least tens of thousands of dollars.

Joe Fonicello said, "I was looking for a way to make money while traveling and not having to physically do any sort of work. I didn't want to be working. I wanted to be traveling and having a good time."

Fonicello and his girlfriend, Abbe Minor, were attending UConn when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the campus down and they started taking courses remotely. With the campus closed down, the two decided to load up a self-made Sprinter camper van and travel across the country while taking their courses.

"I was really looking for something I could invest in," Fonicello said. I didn't really expect to make much more than a few percentage points, but it ended up going a little crazy."

With several game consoles being released in fall 2020, he said, he thought it would be a good time to invest in the video game retail store in the hopes of stocks rising a reasonable percentile and collecting on the holiday profits.

"GameStop was trading for $9 per share, which only valued the company at about $300 million," he said. "Very cheap for the company that it was. Maybe this thing is worth like $12 or $13 or $14 and I can make 10-40% on my money. That's where it started being interesting for me."

What happened though was one of the most remarkable frenzies in Wall Street history.

"GameStop was the highest percentage shorted stock on the entire stock market," Fonicello said. "For a stock to have a short interest, which is people betting against it, like 20-30%, that's really high, and that's dangerous because if those people are wrong, then they have to go buy 30% of the shares, which makes the price go up. We knew GameStop short interest was like a 100% or more."

Small time buyers like Fonicello and Minor started buying GameStop and to recoup their losses, hedge funds that were betting against GameStop started buying stock as well, causing a spike that made people millions in a matter of weeks.

"There were more people betting against GameStop than shares even existed," Fonicello said. "It was really dangerous because if this company somehow planned a turnaround and actually executed on it, the stock would blow up. Everyone would be forced to close out their incorrect bets and have to buy the stock at whatever price it was. That would be a huge short squeeze. That was really appealing to me because you'd see a chart of when this happens in the past and it's going along and then out of nowhere, it's a straight up line."

That's what happened in January 2021 when over nine days, GameStop jumped about $77, closing at $86.88 on Jan. 27.

"It was so stressful," Fonicello said. "I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. The stock market opens typically at 9:30 a.m. We were waking up before it opened because big institutions, they can trade much earlier than retail buyers at like 4 a.m."

"There were huge swings," Minor said. "Literally to $350 down to $150 within minutes. It was insane. There was nothing we could do at all. It was surreal because months prior we had joked about this happening. Everybody thought it could happen, but nobody really believed it would happen."

Fonicello and Minor wouldn't say how much their initial investment was, but Fonicello said they started selling their shares when they hit $375.

So theoretically, if they bought 1,000 shares at $9, they would have raked in about $366,000 in profits.

"The market had just opened and it was trading for that, so I would just be throwing in my orders to sell," he said. "I was selling in batches so I could get a good price over time, in case it kept coming up, I could still sell. I didn't want to sell it all at once. We did well on it."

The two now live in San Diego, where Fonicello has created a consulting agency.

"I have one client," he said. "It's a private investment firm."

He also has helped create a community investment website, www.gmedd.com, where advice and discussion is held on what investments are important to watch.

"We want to educate retail traders because we want their knowledge when we buy stock," he said.

Minor has used some of her profits to invest in her own company, Sun Built, that designs and creates modern camper vans.

"The money, if anything, just gave us a backing to explore whatever we wanted," she said. "It changed our life in that way. It gave us freedom, but we didn't really buy anything expensive with it. It more so just gave security."

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