Letter To TradingAnalysis Clients.

Todd Gordon January 17, 2020

Executive Summary

I have joined forces with a top-tier wealth management company to expand the offering of TradingAnalysis with a more robust portfolio management process and begin to offer integrated financial planning. My goal over the next 12 months is to transition out of the day-to-day operations of TradingAnalysis.com and ultimately take on an advisory role. For now, I’m still in the driver’s seat and overseeing all trading and investment decisions. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me directly. todd@tradinganalysis.com

Help Me Help You – My Own Personal Jerry Maguire Moment.

My name is Todd Gordon. I’m 40 years old, married to a beautiful woman (who somehow puts up with me), have 3 healthy kids, a TV career, and have owned a successful trading business for a decade. This is my Jerry Macguire moment and I’m about to make a big change. If you don’t recall, remember the movie with Tom Cruise standing on top of his desk screaming “SHOW ME THE MONEY”? Tom’s character Jerry Maguire had a major breakthrough after a major realization that changed the course of his career.

As a result of this change I recently uprooted my entire family and moved from my wife’s home state of New Jersey back to my upstate roots in Saratoga Springs, NY. I couldn’t make this change in New York City or New Jersey and before I fully explain, I need to go back and start at the beginning.

26 years ago, before my career began, I interned at a stock broker’s office, Paine Webber, in high school in Queensbury, New York. I knew what I was meant to do when I was 16 years old. I was hooked. After high school, it was off to college at St Lawrence University where I majored in economics but was more interested in trading stocks in my college dorm room and my alpine ski practices and races.

I took my first job as a proprietary equity trader in San Diego in 2001, moved to a trading advisory and publication firm in Los Angeles, to a managed futures and hedge fund, to a career on Wall St. as a hedge fund trader and a technical market analyst, and have appeared on CNBC over 500 times. Just recently I signed my 4th, 3-year contract with NBC Universal.

In 2010 I left corporate life with the following I grew from successful trading during the credit crisis to launch my own entrepreneurial trading and advisory business. I have been lucky to offer my trading services and market insights to the investing and trading community over the last 19 years. A few of you may have come across my work, many of you likely have not, and some of you are my current clients.

For the past 10 years, I’ve worked hard to build out my company TradingAnalysis as one of the leading market trading, educational, and analysis businesses on the internet. I have a strong team, but more importantly a devoted and supportive client base that became my friends. Some I have met in person, but many I’ve only met virtually with two computer screens wedged between us.

My trading career at the hedge funds, my interviews on CNBC, and my work at TradingAnalysis have been focused on the short-term stock and options trading world. This is a very competitive and intense niche of the investing universe. Along with the intensity required to trade the markets on a short-term basis, it’s also a saturated subsector of investing and one that has a rather low barrier to entry with no real regulation, opening the door to some unsavory online marketers. This creates a bit of a “get rich quick” vibe of the industry, inducing a “what have you done for me lately” mentality with some clients. In general, my clients see through the hype and realize that trading in the short-term world is still about long term capital appreciation. I have always worked hard to operate TradingAnalysis with the highest degree of integrity.

My 19-year career in the financial markets has been incredibly rewarding and challenging, leaving me with a strong sense of pride, gratitude, and appreciation to have led thus far. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to provide top quality, high integrity analysis and trading guidance to my clients enriching their lives. However, as I sit here at 40-years old I’ve been feeling this growing void that is becoming wider with each passing year. Like the trading markets that are perpetually changing and adapting, it’s time for me to also evolve and fill that void.

As I’m growing older, my values, desires, and stage of life I’m at professionally and personally are evolving. My understanding of how capital markets and long-term capital appreciation actually works is also evolving. In my 20’s in California, I was a very short-term stock and options trader ( a few hours to a day or two). In my 30’s in New York City / New Jersey, I pushed the timeframe to position and swing trading (a week to a few months). Now, in my 40’s, I find myself concentrating heavily on portfolio management, including growing and protecting the wealth I’ve accumulated over the last 20 years. I’ve also been watching the power of continuously compounded return with reinvested dividends and interest payments at work in a portfolio. Amazing stuff. I’ve been focusing more on tax strategies with my various investments. I’m investing in 529’s for my 3 kids. It’s time to evolve.

Now, I have always been a people person. My wife is the first to tell you I love letting another car cut ahead of us in traffic, engage in a longer than a necessary conversation with a stranger, or snow blow my neighbor’s driveway because he’s out of town on a business trip. Trish, being from New Jersey, and me being from upstate NY creates an embedded conflict on our varying opinions of ‘wasted time’. My wife is going to kill me for writing this, but she’ll admit she’s usually in a hurry. Nonetheless, she has a huge heart and is a wonderful mother and wife. Back on track.

I’ve found that operating my internet-based trading business has left me in front of a half dozen trading screens for hours on end by myself. Sometimes my only human contact at work is the weekly TradingAnalysis team skype call, the occasional market video or live stream, or when I travel to NYC for TV. Being an internet entrepreneur can be pretty damn lonely sometimes. It’s time to be true to my nature and refocus on working with real live people 3 feet in front of me sitting at my desk or in their living room. I want to share what I’ve learned about financial markets, learn more about investment and planning time frames, but most importantly develop meaningful relationships that go deeper than two plastic computer screens, and become intimately familiar with the families I’m helping.

About 2 years ago I decided that I was going to begin the transition out of the short-term internet trading world that dealt with a large number of online clients coming in and out of our virtual front door. I received far too many emails that went something like, “Todd, I really like what you’re doing, it’s incredibly complex and I see you work hard, but it’s too much to follow during the day and I need to focus on my full-time career”. Although I’ll never stop doing my beloved forms of market analysis that are very effective, but difficult to market to the general investing public. It’s time to evolve so I can reach out and help people on a more general level of personal finance and investing. I want fewer clients and more attention to those clients. So a while back I decided to make the move towards the new and rapidly expanding world of the Registered Investment Advisor, or RIA for short.

“A fiduciary is a person or organization that acts on behalf of another person or persons to manage assets. Essentially, a fiduciary owes to that other entity the duties of good faith and trust. The highest legal duty of one party to another, being a fiduciary requires being bound ethically to act in the other’s best interests. “

An RIA firm lives and breathes the fiduciary relationship to the fullest extent. The RIA firm is bound by the law to do what is in the very best interest of the client, which is not exactly the case with major brokerages, wirehouses, or even independent broker-dealers. RIAs can use whatever technology they chose that improves the client experience, keeps the costs as low as possible, which in turn are passed down to the client. RIA’s are not bound by strict bureaucracies that would prevent a note even like this one being written. If you know me, you’ll know I often “put it all out there” on social media for good or bad. I am who I am and I’m probably not going to change. I want you to know that.

Once I completed the move to Saratoga I connected with Shirl Penney who lives in Saratoga. Shirl is the founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners. Dynasty works to enable new advisors to launch their own firm. Take a second to look them up, it’s amazing what Shirl is doing in this exploding industry. Shirl introduced me to several RIA firms in Saratoga. After several meetings and interviews, I had multiple firms interested in bringing me on board.

I’m happy to report that as much as the potential firms were interviewing me, I was interviewing them. I know I have much to learn in this business and wanted the best mentors I could possibly find to get up to speed as quickly as possible.

There was one that stuck out, Ascent Wealth Partners. Ascent Wealth Partners was founded by 3 accomplished professionals in their respective fields of law, accounting, and investments. The principals have diverse backgrounds that allow them to offer a very well rounded suite of services that goes beyond many RIA’s focus of only portfolio management. That said, as I dug deeper, I was extremely impressed with their investment and analysis process, history, and success. Being that I spent the last 20 years trading the stock market, this needed to be a key component of a firm I wanted to join. Digging deeper yet, and as Shirl indicated to me, Ascent takes great pride in leveraging the partner’s respective backgrounds to go beyond just portfolio management and puts a great degree of importance on integrated planning with the balance of investment clients’ lives. This includes lending advice on retirement planning, education planning, insurance, trusts, wills, the sale of a business, tax strategies, and the list goes on. I have a ton to learn to be proficient at this level, but Ascent operates very much as a tightly integrated team where everyone lends a hand to service a teammate’s client creating the very best client experience and ensuring the fiduciary responsibility. In fact, I’m about to start studying for the Certified Financial Planning exam, or CFP for short. I’ve had discussions with them about lending my expertise in options and hedging strategies for the portfolios and they are very open to it. Ascent’s motto is “Clients First, Always”. As Jerry Maguire said, fewer clients, more attention. This is my Jerry Maguire moment and I’ve found my new home.

That said, I would like to emphasize my continued involvement in TradingAnalysis, and the company will continue to provide Stock, Options, Forex & CryptoCurrency trade alerts and analysis.

If you would like more information and would like to consult about Todd and Team managing your financial future, please visit the Ascent Wealth Partner website.

I would love to get to know you and help you in any way i can. Drop me an email if you like – todd@tradinganalysis.com

Todd.