He had grown up during the Depression in a household in Great Falls, Mont., where money was scarce. His father traded furs on the Blackfeet reservation, but income mainly came from a small junkyard near the Great Northern railroad tracks.

After his father passed away due to complications of a mental illness in the mid-1940s, my dad packed up the family truck with his three sisters and mom and drove them all to Los Angeles, where a cousin had invited them to stay in a spare bedroom. He turned 13 along the way.

Dad worked three jobs a day through high school to keep his family afloat but got more serious about work after returning from the Korean War. He worked in a liquor store while getting a sales company up and running, but ultimately it all clicked. By the time he passed away, he owned half a block of warehouses in the San Fernando Valley; thriving sales firm selling Japanese stereo equipment to boomers in the sprawling postwar suburbs; and a speaker factory.

He got all the toys that accrue in LA with success, including a super-sexy blue Maserati sports car and a twin-engine turbo plane, which he regularly flew to Utah, Colorado and the Sierras with my two sisters, mother and I to indulge his love of skiing.

Neither of my parents graduated from a four year college, but they were proud to send me to Duke University undergrad and Columbia University for a masters. I banged around at smaller news operations in the troubled economy of the early 1980s but ultimately business perked up and I nabbed an editing position at the Los Angeles Times.

Over the next two decades, I managed to rise through the ranks, ultimately becoming an executive news editor, an investigative reporter and an investment columnist, which gave me for the first time an opportunity to learn how Wall Street really worked. I used the position to interview some of the world’s smartest hedge fund managers, brokerage analysts and private equity investors. The more I learned, the more I came to realize what a ridiculous advantage the professionals had, particularly back in the years before the Internet.

Now here’s where the story turns kind of dark and made me mad enough to change the trajectory of my own career. After my dad passed, my mother was flooded with calls from fund managers and lawyers who tried to persuade her to pay massive, shocking fees to get their services. It was gross and disturbing. I pledged then to do everything possible to help her and other widows obtain smarter advice that was more fairly priced.

In 1997, I was recruited by Microsoft to become managing editor and columnist of their fledgling financial news site ultimately called MSN Money. My column was extremely popular at the time as the Internet was just starting to figure out media, and ultimately, I left to create an investment service of my own that could work for the little guys like my mom at a reasonable cost - particularly during the difficult years of the 2001 dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis. In time I learned that fulfilling my promises to my mother and widows like her could be best accomplished via a reasonably priced newsletter format stacked with guidance from a select band of independent analysts like myself and my great team.

I hope that you agree and will strongly consider using services like our Compound & Conquer and Digital Creators & Consumers at first, and then work your way up the risk ladder to options and futures when you are ready. Let know how you’re doing, as your goals are our goals.

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A Few Final Notes

I believe that ordinary people from all walks of life can learn to turn both bear and bull markets to their advantage by learning to time and exploit the ebbs and flows of market sentiment, global finance, commodity scarcity, corporate earnings and technological developments.

Our customers include teachers, veterans, attorneys, farmers, business owners, athletes, portfolio management pros and even investment industry lifers who have two things in common: Self reliance and self confidence.

A pioneer in the development of stock-rating systems and stock screening software, I am co-inventor on two Microsoft patents and author of the best-selling books "Online Investing," (1999 and 2001 ); “Swing Trading” ( 2003 ); "New Day Trader’s Advantage" ( 2008 ); "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: Annotated Edition" ( 2009 ); and “Fast Forward Investing” ( 2018 ).

I won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Financial Journalism for columns exposing mismanagement of the S&P 500 in 2003; Society of Professional Journalists awards for reporting on Enron and the post-September 11 investment environment; a Society of Business Editors & Writers "Best in Business" award for coverage of the 2008 financial crisis; and was a news editor on Los Angeles Times staffs that won Pulitzer Prizes for spot-news reporting in 1992 for the Rodney King riots and in 1994 for the Northridge earthquake.

In my personal life, I am an avid tennis player and golfer, the father of two and grandfather of one; and in 1990 was the first American competitor in the Raid Gauloises multi-day adventure race, which was a precursor to the “Eco-Challenge” and the TV series “Survivor.”

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this story here.

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