Meet Mr. Goxx, rodent extraordinaire:
Mr. Goxx isn't your regular hamster.
Well, he is a regular hamster, but he has a high-tech crib that's wired to the stock market and makes trades based on what he does.
The business-minded rodent has a trading office attached to his regular cage. Every day, when he enters the office, a livestream starts on Twitch, and his Twitter account lets followers know: Mr Goxx has started a trading session.
By running in his "intention wheel", he selects which cryptocurrency he'd like to trade, as the wheel spins through the different options. His office floor has two tunnels nearby: one for buy, one for sell.
Every time he runs through a tunnel, the electronics wired to his office complete a trade according to Mr Goxx's desires.
Here's a video of how it works:
You may be wondering why someone decided to let a rodent trade stocks.
The minds behind the furry financier are two millennial guys from Germany.
"We felt that everything keeps getting more expensive these days and building savings is super-hard to achieve with high rents to pay," they said.
"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."
Mr Goxx's name is itself a nod to the potential disasters of the crypto market. A company called Mt Gox was once the biggest crypto exchange on the planet - until it was compromised and hundreds of thousands of bitcoin stolen, making the company file for bankruptcy.
It's pretty genius if you think about it. By letting a hamster make your financial decisions, you don't have to worry if it was a lack of skill or competence on your part that caused you to make that poor trade.
Here's the thing, though: Mr. Goxx isn't making poor trades.
He's actually up almost 20%.
The first month was rough. Mr Goxx started on 12 June with €326 (£278), placing an order for Stellar (XLM). One month and 95 orders later, Goxx Capital was down 7.3%.
But as of 27 September, the intrepid trader's career performance is up 19.41%.
That beats not only the return on major stock markets such as the FTSE 100 or the Dow Jones but also the performance of investing supremo Warren Buffet's company, Berkshire Hathaway, according to calculations by crypto news site Protos.
And even in the crypto market itself, Mr Goxx has at times come out slightly ahead of Bitcoin, the biggest of the currencies.
This seems to prove that playing the stock market – like picking a fantasy football team or buying a lotto ticket – is overwhelmingly about luck, with just a little bit of skill that gives the best players an edge.
Mr. Goxx, it seems, is among the best!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
