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Grandmaster: Legendary Investor Bill O’Neil 187

tuses and began studying all of the stocks that the fund bought. Bill found
that they were buying stocks that were reaching new highs, which seemed
crazy at first. Bargain hunting was a common myth in the investing world.
Bill also began to realize from his extensive studies that Jack was brilliant
at reading charts, and this would forever change the way Bill approached
investing.
Bill began an in-depth study to find out what all of the biggest stock mar-
ket winners had in common before they made their big price moves. He
went back to 1950 and realized that the biggest winners all had similar fun-
damental traits in common. Out of this incredibly detailed research, Bill
created the basis of the CAN SLIM Investing System and became the top
performing broker in his firm.
At the age of 30 (the youngest at that time to do so), he bought a seat on
the New York Stock Exchange and started Century Information Sciences to
program and analyze stock data. During that same time, he started William
O’Neil + Company, Incorporated which became a successful investment
research firm.
In 1972, Daily Graphs was created as a weekly printed book of stock
charts.
In 1973, Bill founded O’Neil Data Systems, Inc., to provide a high-speed
printing and database publishing facility.
Investor’s Business Daily was launched in 1984 (called Investors Daily at
the time) and became the first national daily newspaper to exclusively focus
on stocks, revealing data to individual investors that was, prior to the cre-
ation of the paper, available only to professional investors.
In 1998, Daily Graphs Online was launched as a comprehensive equity
research tool, providing investors for the first time a chart with all of the key
fundamental data on one page, making research much faster.
In 2010, the next generation of Daily Graphs, MarketSmith, was
launched. And the evolution continues with Leaderboard services that have
the highest screening capabilities so far.

The Legacy
Bill could have chosen to keep all of his market discoveries to himself but
instead chose to share this knowledge, knowing it would help countless
investors for decades to come, and very likely into perpetuity, since market
psychology never changes. This is Bill’s philanthropic gift to investors that
could never be quantified or ever measured.