While serving two years in Singapore’s National Service, McCormick first-year Emmanuel Carter created an educational app for investing.  

StarryTrader provides timely artificial intelligence-powered stock summaries on market news and educational content. Carter compared the practice format, which allows users to answer a series of questions, to the language-learning app Duolingo.  

Alongside his co-founder Andre Liu, Carter said they created the app to make investing more accessible for Gen Z college students who wanted to “get into investing” but were turned away by complex jargon and strategies. 

“That’s where we come in to give bite-sized but also real-time news, educational information and content to get people over that barrier and hopefully start their investing journey,” Carter said. 

McCormick first-year Matthew Knigin said he was introduced to StarryTrader after meeting Carter in a class in fall 2025. 

Knigin said having an app like StarryTrader would have helped him in middle school, when he first got into investing. 

“I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” Knigin said. “I was just going based on my own sentiment, so I wasn’t looking at financial statements or anything like that. My dad just gave me a small account and said, ‘Good luck.’ If I’d had something like that, I probably wouldn’t have made as many stupid decisions.” 

Carter said he personally started investing when he was 12 years old, after his father, who worked on Wall Street, encouraged him to do so. Carter said “starting early” is always better. 

While Carter had his father to guide him through the process, he said he realized people without that guidance could have a starting point for investing. 

“I was blessed enough to have someone in my life to teach me investing and to bring me through financial knowledge and financial literacy,” Carter said. “We’re working on this thing so that people who don’t have those people in their lives can hopefully fill that void in a way, to help their financial literacy and get them started on their investment journey.” 

Being from Singapore, Carter had to enlist in the National Service when he turned 18 years old due to national requirements. One of Carter’s friends, who was interested in investing, asked Carter to make an app that compiled “real-time news” for finance. 

After starting that endeavor, Carter said he realized it was only “suitable for people who are very knowledgeable about investing,” which is rare for Gen Z. 

“I was talking to people, and they were like, ‘Oh, man, I heard about this investing opportunity, but I don’t know whether I should do it. Is it safe?’” Carter said. “That’s where I was like, how do we pivot to more of an educational news app, instead of just purely news.” 

That was when Carter pulled in Liu, a “good friend” from high school. One year later, in 2024, he brought in his brother, Luke Carter, and his brother’s friend, Kayson Hee, to coordinate marketing. 

During the first few iterations of StarryTrader, Carter said he relied on his squadmates in the National Service for feedback. 

“That’s where my first users came from because you’re just surrounded, in the bunk together, and I could get their feedback on things,” Carter said. “I had really supportive squadmates who would tell me what’s wrong (and) encourage me.” 

Carter said he also utilized Northwestern resources, including marketing professors and The Garage, a hub for students interested in entrepreneurship.

Being at NU expanded his “business acumen,” Carter said, and pushed him to prioritize the user’s experience and feedback while developing StarryTrader. 

“Emmanuel and his team is really responsive to user input,” Knigin said. “He’ll listen, and he’ll implement it eventually. I’ve seen the app grow from something that’s pretty basic when I saw it to something that’s gradually gotten better over the past three quarters.” 

Weinberg first-year Alex DaCorte said he first downloaded StarryTrader after meeting Carter at NU. 

As someone interested in pursuing an investment banking career, DaCorte said he especially likes the news feature of the app, which provides regular market updates and stock summaries. 

“The app does a really good job pulling all the latest and most relevant news articles and sort of laying it all out in front of you,” DaCorte said. 

Carter said his and Liu’s long-term goal with StarryTrader is to form a network for people new to investing. 

“We want to create a community that is a bunch of beginning investors who can be open to share their struggles, to share what they’re going through in their investment journey,” Carter said. “People can just hopefully bond over those struggles and learn together as one.”

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