We’ve all got this friend, Conventional Wisdom. Always helpful around the office, usually has a hand in every task that has to be done, polite to a fault. He dresses well, but not ostentatiously, and he’s smart, but never in your face about it. All in all, he’s a pretty nice guy. When people need help, they turn to Conventional Wisdom. But the best thing about Conventional Wisdom is his advice. Ask him about anything—house repair, losing weight, raising your kids—and he’s got something intelligent to say about it. It may seem really obvious after you think about it, but still, you’ll follow the advice of Conventional Wisdom in most cases since it makes sense, and also because he’s such a nice guy.

Ask Conventional Wisdom about investing. He’s got plenty to say about that. Now ask him about college students. He’s got plenty to say about them, too. Now ask him about the two put together. His response might run a little like this: “College students are notoriously irresponsible. They don’t know anything about investing. Their schools don’t even teach them how to invest. College students make terrible investors and worse advisors. They can’t even manage their own money—why would you trust them with yours?”

Here’s the thing about our friend Conventional Wisdom. He’s a nice guy and all, but he’s dead wrong when it comes to college students and investing. In fact, college students can make some of the most innovative and intelligent investing decisions in the whole game. Before you ask why, I’ll tell you: it’s because college students can look at the market in ways no Wall Street analyst can, and that ability helps them form strategies that trounce the market in wholly new ways. That’s right—in a very significant way, college students actually have an advantage over the professionals on Wall Street.

This is where Connor Haley steps into the picture. Connor began investing when he was in high school—way ahead of the curve, since students typically don’t learn the practical side of investing until they’ve graduated from college. “In high school, I spent many hours a week teaching myself things that aren’t taught in college most of the time,” Connor reflected. “It’s always something I’ve been interested in, and I was frustrated when I found that the resources that existed catered almost exclusively to the post-grad crowd.”

Connor didn’t let that stop him. He devoured books, articles, and any other advice he could come across. By the end of high school, Connor had the theory under his belt—along with a track record to prove he knew what he was doing. He started formally investing in January of 2007, and he has beaten the market by over 30% since then.

“One piece of advice that really hit home when I was reading was a quote from Peter Lynch: ‘invest in what you know,’” Connor explained. “I thought to myself: what do I know? I don’t know oil companies in China, or steel companies in India. What I know is Buffalo Wild Wings, or Netflix. Things I use in my everyday life.”

Perhaps the best example of this approach—using what Connor calls the “college edge”—is Garmin, a manufacturer of GPS devices. “I originally bought Garmin because I have a terrible sense of direction, and my Garmin had saved me many times,” Connor recalled. “I wasn’t the only one, though. Lots of people were buying a GPS because it simplified traveling so much.” Connor saw a huge opportunity in Garmin—he saw that the GPS trend was going to sweep the nation.

Right on cue, Garmin stock soared by over 50%. Then something big happened: the iPhone.

“At that point, Garmin became extremely overvalued,” Connor explained. Once it was clear just how huge the iPhone was, Connor sold his Garmin stock and never looked back. Once again, Connor’s move seemed prescient—Garmin stock tanked, but Connor was high and dry.

“The key in analyzing Garmin was figuring out the trends that were underlying the market. I saw a huge trend of people I knew buying a GPS for their cars. I talked to some of my friends around the country, and they saw the same thing. But when the iPhone came out, I realized it almost entirely obsoleted the car GPS because of how many people were getting iPhones. In both cases, I knew to buy in or to get out because of the trends.”

The importance of trends can’t be overestimated, Connor said: “The market relies on them. If you know which products are long-term trends and which are short-term fads, you can make huge money on both the short and the long side.” And who has the key to that knowledge? “College students,” Connor answers unequivocally. “Particularly, when it comes to gaming, fashion, food, and technology, college students are often much closer to the underlying trends than the Wall Street analyst, which gives them a significant edge.”

This fact has created a huge investing opportunity for college students, according to Connor—a whole class of stocks that professional analysts can’t hope to understand, but that college students can. However, that opportunity has gone unnoticed, in large part, by the college population. To remedy that situation, and to take advantage of the unique edge that college students have on the market, Connor decided to start a business: CollegeStockPicks.com.

“The goal of CollegeStockPicks.com, from the very beginning, was twofold,” according to Connor. “First, to help college students develop the investing skills that their schools have failed to teach them. Second, to turn the great investing ideas that college students have into profitable investing advice.” Along those lines, Connor was sure to stress that any college student, not just an investor, can benefit from his site. “College students have great investing ideas, and a lot of the time they don’t even know it. CollegeStockPicks.com teaches them how to find those ideas and how to think about the market in a way that will help them. It’s also a great place to network and stay on top of the latest trends.”

To do that, Connor needed help. He started by recruiting some of his friends to the cause, each of which brought a unique set of skills to the table: Austin Branch, Kara Fenton, Rob Boling, Emelie Rodriguez, Sam Souryal, Carson Chapman, Giancarlo Carleo, and Michael Lawson. “The importance of the team can’t be overstated,” Connor said. “Each one of them is incredibly talented, and without every single one of them, CollegeStockPicks.com never would have taken off. We’ve got some of the best young writers, executives, marketing strategists, and writers in the country, I think, working on this team.”

Another important ingredient in CollegeStockPicks.com is Connor’s recent experiences—Connor has taken a gap year for the 2009-2010 school year (before attending Harvard in the fall), during which he has interned at TheStreet.com, which is run by Jim Cramer, and The Motley Fool. Connor’s experience working at two of the biggest online financial newsletters in the nation has proved invaluable in honing his investing skills, and in starting his own newsletter.

Building any business has its difficult stretches, and CollegeStockPicks.com was no exception. The biggest challenge, by far, was the fact that despite the team’s many talents, none of them could build a full website. “We literally talked to 15 different web developers before we finally found one that worked for us,” Connor remarked. Finding a developer took the team months of valuable time.

Also, the fact that the team was composed of college students took its toll on productivity. Team members were spread out across the country, from New York to College Station. Face-to-face meetings with all members were impossible except during the Christmas holidays and the summer. And that doesn’t even factor in schoolwork, extracurricular activities, social life, and exams, all of which come with the college lifestyle.

“Really, a lot of things had to come together for this to work,” Connor relates. “My gap year experience, finding the right developer, and having a great group of students who were willing to spend time on a website we weren’t really sure would ever get built.”

The work, it appears, has paid off. CollegeStockPicks.com recently launched, and from the look of it, it’s a launch you don’t want to miss.