How Two 17-Year-Olds Accidentally Built a Finance Newsletter With 57,000 Readers

Two 17-year-old high school seniors started a charity in 2024 to educate less privileged teenagers in financial markets—they solicited donations from Wall Street

They ended up with a 57,000-strong subscriber newsletter devoured by Wall Street bros. Now, college is taking a backseat to further monetizing the newsletter, which is characterized by a Gen Z-perspective that investors would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

“Maybe I’m out of my wheelhouse when I talk about oil prices or private equity deals in Europe in the hospitality industry, and you might say, ‘What the hell does he have to say about this?’ Well, the point is, what you’re hearing, no matter what it is I’m saying, what you’re hearing is filtered through a given perspective that you’re not getting elsewhere,” that of Gen Z, co-founder Jasper Gould said. “And we try to be very intentional about emphasizing the portions that we know you’re not going to be getting elsewhere.”

He started the newsletter about 18 months ago with fellow upperclassman Emile Chilingirian. The pair first created an Instagram account, but moved to the written word because they found in their lengthy discussions that they had a lot to say that worked better in long-form than on social media. Earlier this month, the New York wrote up their story, leading to 60 paid signups and $10,000 in annualized subscriptions in 24 hours. A subscription to their newsletter costs $150 per year or $15 per month.

“The first order of business is to monetize to a point where we are very, very comfortable with our operating business, such that we know we have money to invest on things and try new things,” Gould said. “We want to build out the support network necessary, such as representation, manager, publicists, all of these folks that will help support us.”

The young men have followed their instincts, untethered by expectations about what a financial publication is supposed to sound like, who is qualified to write one or even what its founders are supposed to do next. That naivete has become an asset. While publishers, investors and marketers spend enormous amounts of time trying to decipher the next generation, Gould and Chilingirian offer something much simpler: a direct line into how two members of it—along with their youthful extended network—see the world.

“When we started the Substack, we were not thinking about that as a business endeavor,” Gould said. “We were talking about these same companies where there was readership, which led to more readership because an article snowballs when you’re writing about Goldman Sachs’s earnings as two high schoolers and Goldman Sachs employees are reading it, and they’re sending it to everybody, saying this is kind of funny, or like this is an interesting opinion, or I don’t know if I agree with this, but check this out, and I think that’s what happened.”

They’ve learned quickly that newsletters are “a very opaque space in terms of understanding where growth is really coming from, and what type of person is reading and why.”

“It’s harder to tell exactly what everyone’s there for and exactly why they’re there, and it’s tough to pinpoint always which articles led to growth, or at least tough for us. Maybe some people are better at it, but we don’t have a totalizing theory on exactly what happened in that period, but it grew, it blew up.”

They realized they had a premium audience, young to mid-career and some very senior finance people, and could monetize the offering, something they started to focus on three months ago. They’re now looking at selling ads and are seeking a fractional ad sales person to support them.

So Much To Say

Gould and Chilingirian are not your typical high schoolers.

Gould receives the paper versions of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal at his Brooklyn doorstep and the two exchange three-page email arguments on everything from money to objectivism and universal morality versus Nietzschean moral relativity.

Comments on the New York Post story on Passing The Torch called them two lucky rich kids whose dads must work in finance and who must have given them a leg up. Gould readily acknowledges his privilege, but says his father was a lawyer and is now an executive coach and is also a passive investor. Chilingirian’s father is a Google engineer, and both of their mothers work in non-profits.

Gould started investing in the seventh grade with $1,000 he got from an aunt and money he raised selling random things around the house on eBay, including anime book sets that Walmart had incorrectly shipped to their home and declined to receive in return. He had bought the stock in Nvidia and the Magnificent Seven and didn’t pay attention again until a while later and was stunned at the profit, so he decided to dig in and spent ninth grade studying the markets.

The next year, he dragged Chilingirian into the fray, essentially putting him through financial boot camp until they had educated themselves to the point where they sometimes sound like they know more than the average analyst.

Then they built the charity, Brooklyn Youth Charitable Investment Group, and cold called, via LinkedIn, Wall Street banks and hedge funds to get their support with donations—they have raised over $150,000—and speakers from places like Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.

Those donors became the core audience for Passing The Torch—something they’re now focused on monetizing.

The Content

The duo is very clear about their mission to write from the Gen Z perspective. And they go deeper than most. Earlier this week, they published a take on the “Eurosummer Economy,” basically the Euro trip that high school grads take the summer before they head to college. But they didn’t just talk about the trend. They did research and found that, regardless if you come from a billionaire family or not, you’re more than likely to stay at a hostel than at a five-star hotel.

From that conclusion, among others, they named some companies that are exposed to the traveling teenagers and that investors might target.

That’s firsthand insight from the up-and-coming generation, the one that investors, marketers and media companies are always looking to decipher.

Their peer group is also their market research.

“We’ll talk to our friends and we’ll just say, ‘What fashion culture trends do you have an opinion on that you haven’t heard talked about?’ And we’ll hear about Birkenstocks. We’ll hear about nightlife in New York City and the cool clothing brands and sneakers and television. Are you watching streaming? Are you in movie theaters? Are you reading books? What social media do you like? Which ones do you hate? Why do you hate them? When you hang out with your friends, what do you do? What sports are you playing? What sports teams are you supporting?”

They keep track of everything in a notes app and will often hold onto them until relevant news breaks.

In mid-June, they wrote about the death of the sneakerhead, arguing that Gen Z had abandoned the scarcity-and-status culture that once made Jordans and Dunks coveted, which had given Nike enormous pricing power. Two weeks later, Nike reported earnings that showed continued weakness in that exact business. In July, the Wall Street Journal followed with a story on Nike’s sneakerhead market share slipping, echoing the Passing The Torch piece.

Not bad for a couple of teenagers from Brooklyn.

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