William O'Neil + Company

Investment decisions are directed by the O'Neil family leadership: David O'Neil serves as CEO and Scott O'Neil as President. The firm applies its proprietary CAN SLIM methodology across all portfolios, which is a quantitative and fundamental system developed by founder William O'Neil. Day-to-day stock selection is executed by a team of portfolio managers and analysts in Los Angeles.

CAN SLIM is a seven-principle stock-picking framework: Current earnings, Annual earnings (growth), New products or services, Supply and demand (share count), Leader or laggard (relative strength), Institutional sponsorship, and Market direction. It was formalized by William O'Neil in the 1960s and remains the firm's core investment process.

The firm primarily invests in US-listed stocks with a growth orientation. Its mutual fund and ETF strategies focus on large-cap and mid-cap US companies. The firm's research database covers global stocks, but the asset-management side concentrates on US equities.

MarketSmith is a research platform that provides charting, screening, and data analysis tools, widely used by institutional investors and active traders. It incorporates the same CAN SLIM screens used internally by the firm's portfolio managers. The revenue from MarketSmith subscriptions provides a fee stream independent of AUM-based management fees.

No, William O'Neil + Company operates as an SEC-registered investment advisor and asset manager, offering pooled vehicles like mutual funds and ETFs, as well as separately managed accounts. The O'Neil family controls the firm, but the wealth-management structure serves external clients in addition to the family's own capital.

The O'Neil Global Growth ETF (ticker: ONECX), launched in January 2024, represents a move into the ETF wrapper for the firm's equity strategy. This provides retail and institutional investors with a lower-cost, daily-priced vehicle that follows the same CAN SLIM approach as the existing mutual fund. It signals a shift toward greater product accessibility.

The firm's wealth stems from the success of its founder, William O'Neil, who began his career as a stockbroker and later created a data-driven investing system that attracted institutional clients. The firm's own trading and research subscription business generated profits that were reinvested. The O'Neil family's personal holdings are not publicly separated from the firm's corporate assets.