Andrew Diaz

At 19, Andrew was a single father working retail for $7.25 an hour while attending college. Trading full-time wasn't an option yet — he needed guaranteed income for his son. There was a day he didn't have enough money to buy diapers. He remembers crying on the way home because he didn't want to ask for help. That was the night he knew something had to change.

Not long after, he walked into a Barnes & Noble and picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. It reframed how he thought about money — investing, real estate, building something of his own. Real estate and a business weren't within reach yet, so he started smaller: every spare dollar went into stocks, and every spare hour went into books on trading and personal finance.

School during the day. Work at night. In between, he started reselling shoes out of the mall online — a side hustle that grew into roughly $1,000 a week, all of it funneled straight into the market. Call him a science nerd if you want: he leaned hard into biotech and tech stocks, chasing the names he understood best.

In 2016, his account crossed seven figures for the first time. He'd started at Amgen in 2014, and instead of spending the paycheck, he kept feeding it into the market. His now-wife was the one who pushed him to start teaching. He worked with a single mother of three, helped her learn to trade for herself, and watched it actually work — that was the proof he needed. In 2017, Stock Market Wolf was born.

Two master's degrees. A bachelor's. A management role at Amgen. An 8-figure trading account. Multiple homes. A wife and three kids. What started at zero has grown into 17,000+ students taught and 17 years of trading experience — all built on the same idea that got him through the hardest years: keep showing up.