Outside guests and young incarcerated men flocked to Curtis “Wall Street” Carroll’s Financial Education Class to hear him translate investment jargon into terms they understand.
Up-and-coming filmmaker Taylor Laslie drove up from Los Angeles to check out the class. She heard about it from a Life of the Law podcast.
Despite being a 2012 Yale graduate, she knew nothing about investing.
“Yeah, I am one of the people who thinks about finance as being an elite game,” said Laslie. “My parents are lawyers and I am well-educated but I never thought about stocks, finance, and assets management. I’m similar to a bunch of the guys starting out in this program.”
Her lack of investing knowledge is the norm for Black people. Only 25 percent of Black households have over $10,000 saved for retirement, compared to about double that percent of White people, according to the telecast Nightly Business News.
“That means the odds are you will never be financially sound,” said Carroll. “You’re screwed…so what’s your alterative – drugs, robbery? When I heard that, I almost cried.”
Echoing the statistics of non-stock-owning African-Americans were other guests at the March 10 class, including Mario Catley, author of Why Not You: Nine Steps to Reprogramming Your Family’s Health, and his cousin, stay-at-home mother Travina Catley.
“I want to get educated; If I’m educated, I’ll be able to educate others as well,” said Travina. “This is something that we didn’t grow up learning, so it would be nice to be able to help others, so they grow up financially free as well.”
Carroll gained national fame for teaching fellow-incarcerated men the money management and investing skills he developed in prison after learning how to read and studying the stock market.
Now his classes are changing the landscape of investors. Of the 50 incarcerated men who braved the rain to attend, at least 17 were men under 25 years old.
Carroll commanded the attention of the class with his candid dialogue and use of prison analogies.
“It’s not about the money; it’s about style of management,” said Carroll. “If you can’t manage cookies and chips … then you can’t manage money. We are trying to change that tide. You can’t keep your mom from going to a home … you are broke. It ain’t your choice. We ain’t even in a position to take care of our elderly.”
Robert A. Bagwell, a 19-year-old Hispanic student with VL tattooed on his face, said “It’s fairly simple. It’s not that hard to understand the way they are teaching it.”
Laslie said, “Wall Street’s ability to take seemingly scary financial situations and turn them into understandable terms is incredible, because teaching is a really hard thing to do. It says a lot about his patience and passion.”
Joe Hancock, Carroll’s assistant teacher, handed out small packs of cookies to youngsters who could tell him what a P/E ratio is.
Carroll explained why he uses unconventional methods with his younger students. “The same old status quo doesn’t work. I’m here (in prison, so for him) the battle was lost. We’ll lose the war if we don’t do something different. It took me 10 years to realize I needed to make some changes. We have to find a faster pace to get them (young students) to see the need to make a change.”
Carroll also instructed the class on how to evaluate when a disaster could mean a company’s stock is undervalued.
“I find value by going into the storms, because people that run from a storm leave all their stuff behind,” said Carroll. “Oil is the crisis which means oil is the value. For the people in the streets, they love it because oil is cheap. With money they are saving, they are thinking of buying a new car…they are consumers. They aren’t thinking about benefiting from the very thing that is saving them money – lower oil stock prices.”
The San Quentin Prison Report, the prison’s TV-crew, filmed the class for a teaching tool in other places.
“It seems like it is a blessing that this gentleman has gotten the opportunity to educate himself in the system, and now he’s educating others,” said Catley.
More information about Curtis “Wall Street” Carroll can be found at www.wallstreetfeel.com
