William O'Neil

William Joseph O'Neil (March 25, 1933 – May 28, 2023) was an American businessman, stockbroker and writer. He founded the stock brokerage firm William O'Neil & Co. Inc in 1963 and the business newspaper Investor's Business Daily in 1984. O'Neil was 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.

Early life and education
William Joseph O'Neil was born on March 25, 1933, in Oklahoma City. When he was 14, he moved to Dallas, where he later graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School. He studied business at Southern Methodist University, received a bachelor's degree in 1955 and served in the United States Air Force.

Early career
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 (PMD). 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.

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 was married and had 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 he took great interest in were Bernard Baruch, Jesse Livermore, 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.

O'Neil died on May 28, 2023, at age 90.