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Wall Street’s new guilty pleasure started as a lunchroom debate between pre-calc and chemistry classes.
Passing the Torch, a newsletter covering markets, economics, politics and culture, was founded in 2025 by Jasper Gould and Emile Chilingirian, both now 17, while they were sophomores at the prestigious Berkeley Carroll prep school in Park Slope.
It now has a subscriber list nearly 60,000 strong — with more than two-thirds of readers registering with corporate emails. Addresses belonging to McKinsey, JP Morgan, Blackstone and Nvidia employees number in the thousands. Hundreds more come from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Palantir and Microsoft.
“On politics and on capitalism, we have a lot of differing opinions,” Gould said. “We probably should have been doing our homework when we were doing this.”
To read PTT is to look inside the collective brain of a generation — one that is largely distrustful of institutions and misunderstood by Wall Street and Main Street alike.
Recent stories from the newsletter have blended anecdotal and statistical data on Gen Z’s sentiment towards automated vehicles and robotaxis; examined how the growing bonds between teens and wristwatches mirrors a growing distaste for AI; and separated functionality from cultural relevance to explain the death of sneaker culture.
“I read this and The Atlantic with equal levels of intrigue,” said Sam Shaffer, an early reader and former eBay executive now consulting New Zealand’s government on business development. “Their writing is not focused on crushing the market … it’s about the trends they see in their world.”
High finance and Big Tech types buy in, Chilingirian believes, for the “Gen-Z takes … variant views that the market may not have priced in yet. We’re experiencing them in real time.”
“The only other source of high school intel is when investors ask their children,” Gould added.
A subscription to Passing the Torch runs $15 per month or $150 per year — with annual revenue for the authors sitting in the five-figure range.
And while Gould and Chilingirian attend a school where tuition costs over $66,000 per year, their reporting is distinctly populist. That’s because the writers are in near constant communication with high schoolers all across the country.
When they’re not working on the Substack — researching and writing eat up a combined 30 hours per week) or in class — Gould and Chilingirian lead the non-profit Brooklyn Youth Charitable Investment Group which came about from them and their friends eating pizza and talking about stocks.
Two years in, 1,000 students from all corners of the country have passed through the organization. BYCIG has hosted talks with the chief economists of the White House, Wells Fargo and the Conference Board of Canada, as well as directors at UBS, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase.
More still have become involved with BYCIG through its investment arm, which manages a fund of about $50,000 raised by parents and finance professionals. Student teams research and pitch investment ideas to an advisory committee, and propositions that the board votes yes on are sent through to an accountant who executes the trade. The group then donates part of their returns to charity.
All in all, the fund has outperformed the market with three of the 12 positions growing more than 40%.
“The primary reaction is amazement,” said Nick Gould, Jasper’s father. A tech industry veteran and self-employed executive coach with a 200-subscriber newsletter of his own. (He credits PTT as the primary source of any growth he’s seen in his own year-old publication.)
Now in the throes of college application season, rising seniors Gould and Chilinigirian are thinking about succession plans for both the newsletter and nonprofit.
“We can’t set up a hedge fund just yet,” Gould said. “I won’t be 18 for another two months.”
