About Us
Many subscribers have expressed an interest
in learning the origins of this site, and this is our attempt
to fulfill those requests.
This company was founded by Rex Jacobsen.
While others assist with editing and behind-the-scenes work,
the investment strategies used by this site are largely based
on his work.
Rex's interest in investing started in the
1980's. One morning, while driving to work, a co-worker told
him about a friend that was buying gold coins in the hopes
of later selling them for a profit. Having always been a saver
at heart, Rex was intrigued by this idea. So when his insurance
agent later introduced he and his wife to the idea of investing
$50 a month in the stock market via mutual funds, they jumped
at the chance. What he was to find out later was that they
were being charged a commission of 8.5%. After doing some
studying, he discovered that there were hundreds of other
mutual funds that were performing much better. Additionally,
many of these mutual funds didn't charge any commission at
all. Rex decided that these no-load funds were the way to
go, so he promptly canceled his monthly investment in the
loaded mutual funds and started investing in no-load funds.
Over the years he read countless books about
investing, majored in finance, and generally dove headlong
into the world of investing. Rex even became a stockbroker,
which was an eye-opening experience. He did not enjoy having
to push the "stock of the week" that the company
was having trouble selling. The reason it wasn't selling?
It was a poor investment. Yet the brokers were given extra
commission to sell it. The whole compensation system seemed
rife with conflict of interest; the riskier the investment,
the more the stockbrokers were paid. Where did the interest
of the client come into play? The company should have been
putting the interest of the clients ahead of their own profits.
Rex wanted to be able to make investment
recommendations to clients that were free from any conflict
of interest. One way to do that was to leave the brokerage
business and start his own investment newsletter.
While studying finance in college,
Rex had come across several ways to attain the hallowed goal
of investing: achieving higher investment returns than the
stock market. The commonly held belief was that 80% of the
professional money managers could not beat the stock market
in the long run. So why not use what he had discovered in
his investment courses as the basis for the core portfolio
for this investment newsletter?
Melding the theories that he had discovered
in the footnotes of investment textbooks, Rex created his
own system for beating the stock market. This would become
the recommended portfolio for our investment newsletter. He
also used it for his personal stock portfolio and has been
testing it since 1993. In 1998 we began sharing Rex's discovery
with others, and at the request of people who wanted to receive
real-time buy and sell recommendations, we started this web
site in 2002.
So please join us in our quest to beat the
stock market. We've passed the most difficult test of all:
our recommended portfolio has easily out-performed the stock
market in both bear and bull markets.
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