Jasper Gould and Emile Chilingirian are juniors at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, but much of their time outside class is spent on projects that look more like a small financial media company than a typical high school activity. The two founded the Brooklyn Youth Charitable Investment Group in September 2024, a student-run organisation designed to teach high schoolers about finance while giving them experience managing real investments and directing returns toward charitable causes. Alongside BYCIG, they created Passing the Torch, a finance and economics newsletter that has grown to around 57,000 subscribers, according to Gould, with readers that include professionals at major financial and technology companies. The publication describes itself as a youth-focused source of analysis covering markets, economics, politics and culture. What began as two teenagers exploring their interest in finance has since developed into a sizeable media operation with a readership extending well beyond their school community.
How Jasper Gould and Emile Chilingirian turned a shared interest in markets into a newsletter
According to the newsletter’s own About page, Passing the Torch describes itself as a publication covering markets, economics, politics and culture, with an emphasis on research written for a younger audience. The publication’s own pages currently give conflicting figures for how frequently it publishes: its About page says it produces 72 issues a year, while its homepage says it publishes more than 200 times a year and dozens of times a month. Because both figures appear on the newsletter’s own website, the exact current publication frequency cannot be established from those pages alone. Gould has said he began learning about finance and investing independently as early as sixth grade, while Chilingirian joined him in developing the newsletter into a broader project aimed at connecting young people’s perspectives with the financial world.
Why the Brooklyn Youth Charitable Investment Group matters beyond the newsletter itself
The newsletter operates alongside the pair’s other major project, the Brooklyn Youth Charitable Investment Group (BYCIG), a student-led organisation focused on financial education, investing and philanthropy. The group’s public-facing pages currently contain conflicting information about its tax status: some describe BYCIG as a 501(c)(3) public charity, while other pages indicate that the organisation was still pursuing or expecting that status. The safest formulation is therefore to describe BYCIG as a student-led nonprofit initiative rather than state its tax-exempt status as an independently established fact.The organisation says it has grown to more than 1,000 members and that its investment portfolio increased by more than 25 per cent during its first year. Those figures are self-reported by the organisation and should not be presented as independently audited results. BYCIG says investment returns are directed toward charitable causes selected by its members, combining financial education with an investment and philanthropic component.
What the newsletter’s growth says about young people’s interest in finance
The newsletter has also reported a readership approaching 60,000 subscribers, although this figure, like the membership and portfolio-growth statistics, is best attributed to the publication rather than presented as independently verified. Gould and Chilingirian have also developed other social-media projects around finance, extending their reach beyond the newsletter itself.Taken together, the projects show how two high-school students have built a surprisingly broad financial-media and education operation before entering university. But the most striking part may be the audience they are trying to reach: their newsletter explicitly positions itself as being built by youth and read by Wall Street, putting teenagers in the unusual position of producing financial commentary for both their peers and people already working in the industry.
