Who is finance_god?

Written by Aditi Shankar

Notorious Instagram meme account finance_god has garnered over 30,000 followers. The genius behind the account is, in fact, an undergraduate student here at NYU. 

1. What was the inspiration behind starting the account?

I was locked in a vicious cycle of reading an article in the Wall Street Journal and falling asleep. Let’s be honest, unless it is for work or because we have some vested interest, we don’t really read finance news. I made it fun for myself so I would not fall asleep. Of course, the content has evolved much more since then, but the core reason for why I started is still there.

2. What was your follower acquisition strategy?

I built complex algorithmic machine learning models to find the people with the propensity to follow me back after I follow them. Then I mercilessly unfollow them.

3. Why do you prefer to remain anonymous?

I don’t want anyone trying to steal my hard drive with few hundred Bitcoins in my American Gardens Building on W. 81st Street on the 11th floor.

4. Favorite post?

My favorite post has to be the Drake post on how I perform Due Diligence (right).

It encaptures an interesting phenomenon happening in young investors. Instead of looking for data in Thompson or in a Bloomy terminal (which we have free access to), we resort to other sources that are not reputable at all. E.g. Wall Street bets, Stocktwits, The Gould Standard, or r/investing.