William J. O'Neil is an American entrepreneur, stockbroker and writer, who founded the stock brokerage firmWilliam O'Neil & Co. Inc in 1963 and the business newspaper Investor's Business Daily in 1983. He is the author of the books How to Make Money in Stocks, 24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success and The Successful Investor among others, and is the creator of the CAN SLIM investment strategy.
In 1958, O'Neil started his career as a stockbroker at Hayden, Stone & Company, and developed an investment strategy which made early use of computers. In 1960, he was accepted to Harvard Business School's first Program for Management Development. From his research, O'Neil invented the CAN SLIM strategy and became the top-performing broker in his firm. He bought a seat on the NYSE at age 30 and became the youngest at that time ever to do so. In 1963, he founded William O'Neil + Co. Inc., a company which developed the first computerized daily securities database and sold its research to institutional investors and tracks over 70,000 companies worldwide. Daily Graphs was launched by William O'Neil to produce Daily Graphs, a printed book of stock charts delivered weekly to subscribers in 1972. In 1998, O'Neil launched Daily Graphs Online as a comprehensive online equity research tool and an extension of the Daily Graphs business he launched in 1972. In 2010, Daily Graphs Inc. and its service was re-branded as MarketSmith. In 1973, he founded "O'Neil Data Systems, Inc.", to provide high-speed printing and database-publishing facilities. The company now operates as O'Neil Digital Solutions and has operations in Los Angeles, Dallas and Monroe, North Carolina. The firm provides data-driven publishing and marketing communications. In 1988, O'Neil had a Mon-Fri stock market program on a Los Angeles UHF television station. KWHY-TV Channel 22 would broadcast the one-hour program with O'Neil holding center court. He would discuss the daily general market averages closing, why they closed as they did and what it might portend for the following trading day. The last fifteen minutes of the program were dedicated to the audience; a viewer could call the station, mention a stock they owned or were looking to purchase. O'Neil would bring up a chart on the TV screen of that stock and discuss its merits or caution the viewer. O'Neil would show a chart pattern and advise where to buy or sell. Also, early in the program, stocks that were highlighted were some of the Investor's Daily 200 stock list companies.
Investor's Business Daily
In 1984, O'Neil made research from his database available in print form with the launch of Investor's Daily, a national business newspaper aimed to compete with The Wall Street Journal. In 1991, the publication's name was changed from Investor's Daily to Investor's Business Daily. As of 2015, the newspaper had a circulation of 113,000 and its website attracted 2.9 million visitors a month. In 2016, the newspaper changed its printing schedule to weekly, but continued to publish news daily on its website.
Personal life
O'Neil is married and has four children. He stated in a 2002 interview that one of the books which was an early influence on him was Gerald Loeb's The Battle for Investment Survival. According to O'Neil, this is the best book on the market. Other investors which he took great interest in were Bernard Baruch, Jesse Livermore, Gerald M. Loeb, Jack Dreyfus, and Nicolas Darvas. He also greatly admired Thomas Edison. In 2007, O'Neil started donating to his alma mater, Southern Methodist University and funded a chair in business journalism at SMU's Meadows School of the Arts, he then endowed a professorship in markets and freedom and created the William J. O'Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at the university's Cox School of Business.
