Smart, Smart, Smart Guy -- And Bit Lucky? -- August 18, 2022

From my alma mater (archived):

A 20-year-old university student has made a roughly $110mn gain by selling a stake in struggling retailer Bed Bath & Beyond, after its stock price soared during a month of frenzied trading reminiscent of last year’s meme stock boom. 

Jake Freeman, an applied mathematics and economics major at the University of Southern California, acquired nearly 5mn shares in Bed Bath & Beyond in July, according to regulatory filings, after dismal earnings and the ousting of its chief executive sent its stock price plummeting. 

Freeman bought his stake at under $5.50 a share. 

On Tuesday, Bed Bath & Beyond surged to more than $27 a share. As the stock soared, Freeman sold more than $130mn worth of stock from his TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers accounts. 

“I certainly did not expect such a vicious rally upwards,” Freeman said in an interview on Wednesday. “I thought this was going to be a six-months-plus play . . . I was really shocked that it went up so fast.” After selling the shares, Freeman went for dinner with his parents in the suburb of New York City where they live and on Wednesday he flew to Los Angeles to return to campus, he said.

This is simply fascinating. Read closely:

Freeman’s initial stake cost about $25mn, which he said was mostly raised from friends and family. 

He has invested for years with his uncle, Dr Scott Freeman, a former pharmaceutical executive. 

The two recently built an activist stake in a publicly traded pharmaceutical company called Mind Medicine. 

Freeman also said he had interned for years at a New Jersey hedge fund, Volaris Capital. 

Just before his 17th birthday, Freeman and its founder, Vivek Kapoor, a former Credit Suisse executive, published a paper titled “Irreducible Risks of Hedging a Bond with a Default Swap”. Freeman amassed his more than 6 per cent position in Bed Bath & Beyond via Freeman Capital Management, a fund registered in the cowboy town of Sheridan, Wyoming, according to the filings.

My hunch: Harvard Business School will be ambivalent about using "this" as a case study. LOL.