Kyla Scanlon is hardly your typical markets commentator—but then again how many 16-year-old girls growing up in Louisville traded stock options on the weekend.
“It was just something interesting to do. My parents were supportive,” she says. “My dad dabbled in it and so he was like, ‘this is a cool way for you to explore mathematics and understand how markets work.’”
Scanlon, now 26, is one of the most prominent of a new breed of financial pundits who ply their trade on social-media platforms such as YouTube (where she has 32K followers), Substack (51K subscribers), X (160K followers), and especially TikTok (168K followers.) Using just an iPhone 11, tripod, microphone, and a whiteboard, she posts six or seven videos a week.
Her company, Bread, garners revenue from ads on social media and brand deals from the likes of Bloomberg, (where she is a Bloomberg Opinion contributor), shareholder advocacy group We The Investors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.