Indie Content Creator: ‘Markets With May’ Is Finance For The Everyperson
So long as the market shows promise, which it always will, the demand for expertise on its inner workings will remain high. Fertile investments mean making the best use of your money, but not everyone has insight into how to make this work. This is precisely why informed advice on the subject is necessary.
May Ling is one such online personality who looks into the dynamics of the economy and provides people with guidance on how to finesse the market. She is the Chief Markets Strategist at Gurula, an investment app that specializes in “long-term, value-based investing.” With a focus on options and market fundamentals, her services on the platform cost $50 a month and include daily market commentary, tutorials on financial skills, Q&As and access to related events.
Moving away from the formalities of her full-time job, she also uploads a lot of her videos for free on her YouTube channel, Markets With May. She launched this page at the beginning of 2022 but has already released over two hundred videos plus several shorts extracted from them. Through this, she aims to “empower the retail investment community by synthesizing a higher quality of company and macro economic news.”
Upon viewing Ling’s YouTube content, however, it becomes clear that the free content isn’t enough for someone genuinely interested in what she has to offer. Rather, it’s a way of luring people in and having them sign up for her services on Gurula. The YouTube channel is like her portfolio in that it consists of her daily commentary videos a few days after they are streamed and posted on the source app. Though the page banner says she posts a new video every week, she has been posting far more frequently of late.
As a former Wall Street executive who has worked with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Ling is a voice of authority on the market’s many facets. The YouTube material, which is an advertising branch of Gurula, is based on her research around company calls, reviewing documents and interacting with industry analysts.
The channel has more specific themes that are compartmentalized as playlists. The steadiest among these are the monthly stock market recaps, which have been bundled since the channel kickstarted in January. Similarly, she bundles up videos that analyze specific stocks, including companies such as Paypal, Berkshire Hathaway and Ali Baba. On a broader scale, she has compiled playlists on subjects she has spoken about on multiple occasions, such as Amazon, Oil & Gas Stock and CPI Data. Ling also has a few tutorials on subjects such as “Tutorials: Reading the 10K” and “Financial Market Jargon Tutorials” as well as “Special Guests Interviews” that brings in external perspectives. All of these are chopped up into shorts, which basically highlight the full episodes and provide links to them — they’re essentially trailers of the longer videos (though some of these have also been converted into standard videos and put into a playlist).
Ling’s output on YouTube is nothing fancy — she recently started out on the platform and her uploads are very specific to those who have prior knowledge on what she’s talking about. In other words, this isn’t a “Marketing and Stocks for Dummies” channel; that’s what the tutorials on her Gurula page are for. It might, however, benefit Ling to lean a little in that direction, either by creating videos that teach novices about her command or to cater her videos to a broader audience by dissecting it further for common understanding. This, of course, should only be a priority if she truly wants to build her YouTube presence and earn money through that.
Right now, it is inaccessible to the layman. This is perhaps why her most popular video has only 1.2K views, with a total of around 17,000 from every upload. On average, most of her videos get under 100 views. It seems that she is serving a very limited audience even though her expertise is in much higher demand than her numbers suggest.
Ling’s YouTube channel is still very much like an upper-division online class in terms of presentation, execution and material. If you’re a freshman, especially one with an undecided major, most of it will not make any sense to you. This is a problem because if viewers can’t assess how good she is at what she does, she won’t be able to generate the trust that will result in people signing up for her premium services.
Ling has an unforced screen presence. All she needs to do now is put in a little work if she truly wants to build her YouTube following and grow it beyond being a loaded commercial.
Her content is dry and straightforward, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For those genuinely interested in what she talks about, the information is enough and it doesn’t need to be too flowery. The issue is expanding past the select few who “get it,” because her work is based on extensive research and the result is dense and detailed. It could easily attract more viewers if it was within reach of the average viewer.
