Welcome To The New Investing Systems Website

It all started in 1995…

That’s when I got my first Packard Bell computer from Circuit City.

I’d been using computers at work up until that point, but when Windows 95 came out it changed everything. That’s because I was able to get on the Internet from home for the first time. AOL dial-up.

I took to the computer like a fish to water. I was an early adopter and was hooked on the Internet from that point on. Those first few months I spent almost every waking hour in front of the screen.

I was getting into stocks at the time too. The Dot Com bubble was in full swing. Stocks traded in fractions. I was working as an office manager and if you weren’t a SOES Bandit you traded stocks by calling your broker or trading using a touch tone phone.

I had a list of stocks I’d follow and use the phone to check quotes just like we do now. Except it was way different. “Press 1 for a quote – press 2 to buy – press 3 to sell”.

Back then we’d pick up a Barron’s every Saturday and subscribe to IBD which got delivered to my office. That’s where we got stock ideas. Also the CNBC ticker, which was way different in those days. You could practically “read the tape” watching the ticker. I made trades based on what I saw scrolling on the CNBC ticker.

Those were the Dan Dorfman days. Those were the .com frenzy days.

My fascination with the computer and all the technology led me to learn how to create a website. I bought a HTML / CSS book in 1996 that’s 4 inches thick and I still have it. Creating a website from scratch back then was part art and part science – kind of like it is now, but you had to code everything by hand.

So I was really into the stock market and really into computers at the height of the Dot Com Bubble.

That’s when something happened that changed my life. I was browsing in a bookstore when I stumbled across this book. It was like I found the Holy Grail.

The first thing about it was the fact that it was a purely mechanical, mathematical trading strategy and all you needed was a pen, paper and a calculator. “Get out your paper and draw 13 columns and here are the formulas we’re going to use”.

So it dawned on me that it would be really cool to write a “spreadsheet” that did all the calculations automatically. Long story short, I got with a good friend of mine that was also into this stuff and we spent the next six months trying to build an Excel spreadsheet to implement this trading system. We learned a lot about Excel and programming and hit tons of roadblocks along the way, but finally got it to work.

Everyone was caught up in the technology boom and the stock market boom and we were too. We decided the thing to do was create a website and sell our software. So that’s what we did. In 1998 we started our company and sold our “stock trading system” on 3 1/2 floppy disc for $5. We shipped it out in a cardboard mailer. People were sending us checks in the mail and a few were actually ordering online.

That’s how we started in this business.

A couple years later we met up with some professional programmers and had them build a real Windows version of the software and the rest is history. We started exploring other trading systems and coming up with new ideas for stock trading software.

We went to the Money Shows back in those days and that was a blast. We went to a couple Money Shows in Orlando and Vegas during the height of the Dot Com era. It was like the Wild West and the similarities to today are interesting. But that’s all for another post.

To be continued…