Mr. Goxx the crypto-hamster is the furry financier outpacing the fat cats

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It's wheely sound advice.

Mr. Goxx the crypto hamster
(Image credit: Mr. Goxx)

One of the perennial arguments about stock market trading is whether the markets can be predicted—or whether you'd be better-off just randomly picking some stocks and hoping for the best. The latter is a very basic summation of the random walk hypothesis, a foundational financial theory still argued-over today, and has prompted many fun experiments over the years about what methods of stock-picking can outperform professional traders.

And so to cryptocurrency which now has the financial theory hero it deserves: Mr. Goxx the hamster (thanks, Protos). This enterprising rodent is the subject of a livestream wherein it 'selects' various crypto stocks using a hamster wheel, then chooses to 'buy' or 'sell' depending on which tunnel it chooses afterwards.

"Unlike other hamsters, [Mr. Goxx] owns a fully automated high-tech trading office, directly connected to his normal hamster-friendly home (he can enter and leave it whenever he wants)," says the Twitch profile. "By running in the wheel, Mr. Goxx is able to select certain assets and by entering one of the tunnels, he decides whether to place a buy or sell order, which is then sent over to a real trading platform via API (yes, real money involved)."

The office setup of crypto hamster Mr. Goxx.

(Image credit: Mr. Goxx)

When Mr. Goxx chooses to buy a cryptocurrency, the habitat triggers a $20 purchase in that crypto. When he chooses to sell a stock, all of the holdings are liquidated. This is a no-holds-barred hamster.

Mr. Goxx prefers the night shifts (the setup has a night vision camera that uses indirect IR light), and his wheely sound approach saw his initial stake of $390 currently up 20% at around $468. The rodent investment fund had been doing even better until the recent fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin (after China declared all cryptocurrencies illegal), at one point sitting pretty on $580. As even our furry friends have to learn, what goes up can also come down.

Still, a 20% increase in under three months (Mr. Goxx began trading in June 2021) is nothing to be sniffed at. It beats out the performance of the FTSE 100, Dow Jones, and even the likes of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway.

The BBC spoke to the two German men behind Mr. Goxx, who wished to remain anonymous, but said:

"We felt that everything keeps getting more expensive these days and building savings is super-hard to achieve with high rents to pay. It seems like most people from our generation see no other chance than throwing a lot of their savings on the crypto market, without having a clue what's going on there.

"We were joking about whether my hamster would be able to make smarter investment decisions than we humans do."

At the moment the answer seems to be yes, though I'm sure Mr. Goxx isn't giving Warren Buffett any sleepless nights. The hamster has its own subreddit and can also be found on twitter, where the funniest thing is that the project's creators have to constantly remind people that the hamster is not really qualified to give financial advice.

Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."