Curtis Carroll is a 35-year-old resident of San Quentin prison. In 1996, when he was 17, he was involved in a robbery that led to a man’s death. He was accused of being the shooter. Three years later, he was convicted of murder and given a 54 years-to-life jail sentence.
He says he entered the prison system an illiterate. Today, other inmates call him “Wall Street” because of his interest in the stock market, an interest born of a very basic desire to make money. (As a teenager, he was a petty thief and graduated to more serious crime.) One day, it dawned on him to learn how to read in order to make money in the stock market. In 2012, he was transferred to San Quentin, which has a robust education program. Marketwatch visited him in prison to talk about his journey to becoming the “Oracle of San Quentin,” a play on Warren Buffet’s nickname. Buffet is, of course, one of Carroll’s idols.
Today he’s a teacher in the program, passing along personal finance tips, “what he calls ‘the timeless rules of personal finance,’ which are: saving to build a nest egg and create an in-case-of-emergency fund; controlling costs by not allowing monthly expenses to exceed monthly after-tax income; not borrowing money you can’t repay; and diversifying your assets.”
But he’s also been successful with his choices. His stock picks are posted on the wall in the prison so everyone can see he’s not a fraud. Writes Marketwatch, “The picks on the wall include Zynga, Bank of America and Facebook, which Carroll says he bought in December of 2012. What the three stocks had in common at the time: Each was getting substantial bad press—most notably Facebook, thanks to investor malaise after its disappointingly muddled IPO. Those stocks are up 20%, 47% and 134%, respectively, since December 14, 2012; over that same stretch the S&P 500 is up 39%.”
The site notes that most people in prison don’t have access to the brokers and advisors in the outside world to trade in stocks, so Carroll’s situation is unusual. Moreover, 84 percent of people entering the prison system are making less than $2,000 a month, so buying stocks aren’t usually part of their budget.
But this sort of financial literacy is something that everyone, in and out of jail, can stand behind. Though Carroll may spend the rest of his days in prison, some of the inmates that he’s teaching through the prison program say they plan on taking the lessons learned back to the outside world with him.
