As the 1990’s came to a close, Bill Matson, our CEO, became increasingly concerned with the conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and lack of integrity tainting Wall Street’s advice to small investors, in addition to the dangerously inflated valuations being accorded to tech stocks.

To address these issues, he set out to create a uniquely comprehensive guide to stock market investing that was published in 2004 as Data Driven Investing (co-authored with Mitchell R. Hardy). Joe Moglia, then CEO of TD Ameritrade, one of America's largest discount stock brokerages, referred to Data Driven Investing as “groundbreaking” in his own 2005 book entitled Coach Yourself to Success: Winning the Investment Game. 

Bill’s strategies were largely informed by exhaustive study of historical data, including millions of financial statement and trading data points for thousands of companies during the 52 years from 1951 to 2002.

Beginning in July 2000, when he became a full-time investor, the bulk of his securities portfolio was designated as a “Test Portfolio” (TP), in order to track the efficacy of principles detailed in Data Driven Investing.

The TP’s results have been encouraging, with gross returns of 4233% between July 2000 and December 2018, which equates to 3219% after imposition of a hypothetical 0.375% quarterly fee on assets under management. On a compounded annual basis, returns for this period were 22.6% and 20.8%, respectively. Average annual returns were 29.5% and 27.7%. Note, however that past performance does not guarantee future performance.

Additional performance-related disclosures are presented in the “Performance” section of this site, as well as in the Data Driven Investing book. Understanding of all such disclosures is a critically important prerequisite to understanding the conclusions that may be drawn from the TP’s performance history. Note that the TP’s returns have NOT been audited by an independent third party.

The 2019 online edition of Data Driven Investing is available on the Oyster River Financial, LLC website and can be obtained here.