The history of William O’Neil Securities begins with the history of our founder, William J. O’Neil.
William J. O’Neil is one of the true great American success stories. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to develop his own unique method of stock picking (the O’Neil Methodology) as well as launch his own companies, including William O’Neil Securities and William O’Neil + Company, to help investors improve their portfolio performance.
Born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, Mr. O’Neil began his career as a stockbroker in 1958 with Hayden, Stone & Company, an established stock brokerage firm at the time. His fascination with the securities market led him to develop his own computerized study of what made stocks successful. From his research, Mr. O’Neil pioneered and developed the use of historical precedent to analyze equities in tandem with fundamental and technical analysis. Drawing from these discoveries, he created the CAN SLIM® investment discipline, focusing on the trends and patterns of stocks as they became top performers or underachievers.
He identified seven basic factors that occurred over and over again in almost all top-performing companies as studied over eight different market cycles. He quickly became the top performing broker in his firm. After a 20-fold increase in his own account in 26 months, Mr. O’Neil branched out on his own and founded William O’Neil + Co. Incorporated in 1963. In January 2010, the broker/dealer became William O’Neil Securities, Incorporated. Mr. O’Neil purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at the young age of 30. He summarized, adapted and published his findings as The Model Book of Greatest Stock Market Winners, which was the basis for his CAN SLIM investment discipline.
William O’Neil Securities started as an investment management and brokerage firm. Today, the brokerage firm exclusively specializes in supporting the institutional investment community. The company, headquartered in Boston with offices in New York and San Francisco, provides trading services to hundreds of major institutional clients in the United States and abroad.
In 1972, he founded Daily Graphs, Inc. (now MarketSmith, Incorporated) to provide the individual investor with the tools to find and analyze stocks, utilizing his proprietary Datagraphs™ and proprietary Ratings and Rankings. With this, Mr. O’Neil was able to further his goal to educate people on how to successfully invest in the market.
Realizing the need to deliver his time-sensitive information ahead of the competition, in 1973 Mr. O’Neil founded O’Neil Digital Systems, Inc. (ODS), a high-speed printing facility that pioneered the field of database publishing using state-of-the-art computer technology. Today, ODS specializes in producing time-sensitive publications for many companies in a variety of fields.
In 1984, Mr. O’Neil designed and launched Investor’s Daily (later Investor’s Business Daily®), the first national business newspaper to compete successfully with The Wall Street Journal. Mr. O’Neil used his years of experience in economic and business research and his massive historical database to fill a daily information gap that existed for the individual investor and business community.
Don’t be thrown off by the swarm of gloom and doomers. In the long run, they have seldom made anyone any money or provided any real happiness. I have also never met a successful pessimist.
– William J. O’Neil, Founder
In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, Mr. O’Neil is a successful writer, authoring several best-selling books on investing in the stock market. Mr. O’Neil’s book How To Make Money In Stocks – A Winning System In Good Times Or Bad, published by McGraw-Hill, is in its fourth revised edition and was the best-selling investment book of 1988. He also wrote the best seller 24 Essential Lessons For Investment Success, the 2004 book The Successful Investor, and the forward to the illustrated edition of Edwin Lefevre’s revered financial classic Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
Mr. O’Neil has received numerous accolades including being recognized as one of the Top 100 Business Luminaries of the Century by TJFR Group and MasterCard International. He also received the 2002 Classic Award of Recognition from the AeA, the largest high-tech industry group in the United States. In 2004, The Stock Trader’s Almanac devoted its 37th edition to Mr. O’Neil. He received the prestigious Spirit of Lincoln award in 2005 from the Lincoln Club of Los Angeles, recognizing him for his significant contributions to society. Mr. O’Neil was honored for his research and efforts in developing a plan to help jumpstart the American economy. In 2016, Mr. O’Neil was recognized by The Los Angeles Business Journal as one of the Most Influential People in Los Angeles.
