Background
My name is Noam Mirel. I'm 17 years old, and I have lived in Princeton, New Jersey, since the summer of 2025. Before moving here, I lived in Russia and Israel.
My interest in the stock market and investing started early. In 2020, when I was 11, I had a little bit of money saved up. I decided to start investing after hearing that the stock market crashed during COVID. What drove this decision were family discussions about how the pandemic disrupted the way people live and work. From e-commerce to cloud computing to streaming, this was an inflection point for companies like Amazon, Netflix, Visa, and many others.
I wasn't trading actively. I only made transactions every couple of months whenever something major happened. Even so, after two years, I had a 30% annualized return on my investments. That made me even more passionate and eager to understand how the stock market works.
When I turned 13, I received more money as a Bar Mitzvah gift from my family. With my portfolio already showing meaningful appreciation, I decided to keep investing. I spent a lot of time reading books and articles about how investment decisions are made. This helped me understand how companies work, how they invest in their growth, and what differentiates successful, leading companies from the rest.
The more I learned, the more fascinated I became by the complexities and opportunities. More importantly, I came to understand that while investing looks easy at first, it requires diligent work, research, and discipline. If done correctly, it represents an exciting opportunity for ordinary people, not just finance professionals. But if approached recklessly, the stock market can be a major risk to your financial well-being.
Over the next couple of years, I kept doing the same thing—investing in different companies and slowly expanding the universe of stocks and industries on my radar. As the value of my portfolio grew, I experienced firsthand the power of reinvestment and compounded returns.
The Project
Through this project, I want to help educate the public, especially young people, about financial literacy and the life-changing opportunities that a smart approach to investing can bring. I want to give the younger generation access to the tools and resources I have developed so they can make smart decisions with their money. I want to demonstrate how starting to invest early and consistently can help build a meaningful financial safety net long before retirement. The beauty of it is that compounding works regardless of how much income you earn.
As part of this project, I am developing and rolling out an AI-powered research portal to help people research companies and make educated investment decisions with confidence. I will also provide access to trend-following algorithms with a proven track record. These are for people who want to invest in index products without digging deep into individual company businesses and financials.
In this blog, I will share my progress as the project advances. I will also share my thoughts on the market and describe the thinking behind my own investments.
I'm incredibly excited to go on this journey. Hope we have a fun, meaningful and profitable ride.