Hey there, I’m Matt, Brian’s new CTO at Simply Safe Dividends, and here’s the story of how I arrived here…

 

I remember the first time I traded a stock. It was Google in 2008. My thinking was simple: buy low and sell high!

 

I had no clue what I was doing. Over the course of a few months, I bought and sold Google based solely on whether the price had gone up or down.

 

Here’s my complete trading history for Google between October 2008 and May 2009:

 

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Let me do the math for you: I lost $55 after trading fees. To be honest, I probably didn’t even realize I lost money back then. I just traded willy-nilly.

 

I was mystified by this whole experience. So I turned to a friend who I heard had been doing well as a day trader. He was trading penny stocks using a fancy technique called “technical analysis”. Sounded impressive.

 

He gave me a copy of the book he considered to be his bible: Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes.

 

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Now, I think I’m reasonably smart. I have degrees in physics, math, and economics.

 

But two pages into this book I had zero clue what was being discussed. Charts, graphs, and incomprehensible terminology abounded. How could anyone make sense of this stuff!?

 

Not only that, but it was utterly boring material. Could this really be how people make money in the stock market? I thought.

 

By this point, I was completely turned off to investing in the stock market. I wanted nothing to do with this mystical beast and its crazy charts and terminology.

 

Google was the first and last stock I traded. That is, until a month ago when I joined Simply Safe Dividends…

 

Joining Simply Safe Dividends

Brian and I have known each other for close to a decade. We went to college together, and we’ve worked on previous businesses together. He was even a groomsmen at my wedding!

 

So I was one of the first to know in 2015 when Brian conceived of and started Simply Safe Dividends. Brian came to me and planted the seed that I might work with him on the business.

 

But I was completely uninterested in anything to do with the stock market. Greed, financial jargon, zillions of charts and numbers, the Wolf of Wall Street… I wanted nothing to do with any of that.

 

Over the course of the next year, Brian and I continued to discuss about his business and its progress. Month after month, Brian’s narrative of Simply Safe Dividends became clearer and more relatable.

 

The people he was helping were retired folks who relied on their nest egg to fund their retirement. These people needed help investing responsibly in the stock market. Many of them were novice investors.

 

Brian’s customers weren’t trying to beat the market (a fool’s errand). They didn’t want to thumb through endless pages of stock charts. They just wanted to build a portfolio of safe dividend stocks and get on with life in their golden years.

 

What problems did these retired folks face? The same ones I had as an 18-year-old trading Google stock: mysticism of the stock market and frustration over the lack of good advice.

 

Little by little, I realized Brian was on to something meaningful.

 

This past December, I signed the paperwork to become Brian’s business partner. In January I started work.

 

My title is CTO. My experience is with designing and building websites. Given Brian’s experience as a stock analyst, we will complement each other quite well.

 

But what matters to me most is that we’re in this to take the black magic out of investing. There’s no reason people should have to cope with the current state of investing: confusing jargon, endless gimmicks from websites and financial institutions, headaches from trying to comprehend what a number or chart means.

 

There’s a lot of work to do, and I couldn’t be more excited for the road ahead.