Ben C. Banks is a 19-year-old in charge of his own website for stock market and financial advice. An undeclared management major, Banks is a freshman that is already building a portfolio to land himself internships and impress future employers. 

Already a strong online presence, Banks will soon be bringing forward a new project that will feature writers and editors who will advise and give stock market analysis on a nationwide and potentially global level.

Currently named “The Project,” Banks is working with fellow students across the country to bring forth a one-of-a-kind online resource for people interested in the stock market. The goal is to teach others strategies and provide insight into the financial world while also growing a portfolio for himself and other featured writers. 

All website contributors will be students under the age of 22. The project will be a one-stop-shop for future employers to evaluate contributor’s skills while also showcasing how helpful a tool the project can be to those looking to invest in the market. Banks hopes to run his own hedge fund one day, and believes this website could possibly launch his career in finances and help him reach his career goals.

“You’ll have past content, performance, track records of all your trades and it’ll all be there for everybody to see once the website is launched,” Banks said. “I wanted to educate other people because it is difficult to hit the markets and I wanted to educate myself because if you teach other people, you’ll learn it yourself.”

His current website, www.bencbanks.com, is a technical blog that serves a target audience of people that know at least a little bit about the market, but who really want to learn about how an actual, real-time trader or investor looks at stocks. With a strong online presence, Banks utilizes social media apart from his website like Twitter and StockTwits, a Twitter-like site specifically for stocks. 

Banks currently has an online following of 21,000 on StockTwits and 1,600 on Twitter. Banks gets tweets from 40-year-olds commending him on his market predictions and insights. Once his up-and-coming project is released, his bencbanks domain will become more of a blog and less of an analytical platform. 

“When this new project is launched, it will probably be the only place I post stock market thoughts and analysis and then bencbanks.com will just turn into a personal blogsite rather than a stock market analysis site,” Banks said.

Banks started his career in stocks at the age of 12. He was always curious about the way the stock market worked. He bought his first two stocks in Nike and Target when he was 12-years-old and began trading around five years later. He made his first actual trade based on technical analysis, a way of using historical price fluctuations to base trading choices. Since then, he started posting online in late 2012 and has been a growing resource for advice ever since.

Banks wants his current website to continue to grow, and he’ll continue to produce content to set himself apart so that future employers will take notice. 

“That’s one of the main reasons why I want to do it,” Banks said. “The goal is to create a launching pad for internships through the website. If there’s success, we’ll likely be able to turn it into a company eventually but that’s not a goal that would happen right now.”