When I was asked to write the Who’s That Kid column this week, one person stood out to me, since he has been able to create something that not many people are able to. John Regan, GSB ’22, is a finance major. At first glance, Regan is someone who does his work quietly without any complaints, and as a thrower on the track team, he was always among those who pushed themselves the hardest.

However, there’s more to Regan than meets the eye. He has been able to create a successful online business, one that he describes as “an online financial education business with a focus on equity options.” Regan started his company in early August, and his reasoning as to why is pretty simple: his love of the stock market. “I have always been interested in the stock market. I started learning how to trade the summer going into my freshman year of college and was attracted to options over trading shares due to the amplified potential gains.” 

When I asked him what led to his success, Regan told me that it was not always like this. “I succeed now because I failed over and over. I blew up my trading account many times when I was first learning. However, I looked at the losses as my tuition. People pay hundreds of thousands in college tuition, so why not pay a fraction of that to learn a lifelong skill that can help me compound my money? After getting more consistent with my skill I quickly developed a passion for teaching others. I immersed myself in the Discord trading community, contributing content to multiple servers as an analyst and developing some very meaningful connections,” he said.

Regan’s beginnings allowed for him to flourish within the Discord and finance community. “I met another like-minded guy and we quickly realized how well we worked together,” he said. “We developed a profitable trading system together and also found we had a ton in common on a personal level. We launched a Discord server in early August and the rest was history.” 

Understanding what his company does is pretty straightforward. Regan described it clearly saying, “We perform technical analysis, give trade ideas, make educational content, and host a variety of useful resources such as bots that pull in financial news and data in realtime.” 

Now, his company has grown fairly quickly. “In just 6 months since launching we have over 1100 paid subscribers and are closing in on $500,000 in annual sales. It’s all been a very surreal experience and we feel fortunate to be growing so fast and impacting so many people,” he said. 

These past few weeks, we have seen how the internet has come together for a common goal, and I asked Regan about this as well. More specifically, I wanted to know how he was affected by the Wall Street Bets Reddit situation. “You can’t help but love the story. I think this war of hedge funds vs. the online retail trading community is only just beginning and I fully support it,” he said. “Not only does it bring more liquidity to the market but I think over the long term it can actually make the market more stable and democratize trading.” 

In connecting it back to his business, Regan said, “Regarding our business, the recent Wall St. Bets rally in ‘meme stocks’ didn’t impact us very much. We ride the wave regardless if the market is going up, down or sideways. Our strategy helps us to find opportunities regardless of the market conditions. We made some awesome gains on Nokia ($NOK) and AMC ($AMC) but we differed from the larger populus of reddit/discord traders who claim to be holding forever. We got in and out fairly quickly on these names. There are so many opportunities in the market every single day. There is no reason to get attached to one position, especially on previously failing companies.”

In talking about the future of his company, Regan had quite a lot to say. “It is our hope that we can play a role in empowering the new generation of retail traders by providing the tools and information they need to effectively manage risk, build profitable trading systems, and gain an edge with their trading.” So, to clarify, Regan is making his future right at home.