Stock Market Dynamics, LLC was founded in 2010 in response to the need for an online company that provides an easy to follow newsletter to help investors manage their stock market investment portfolio in just a few mintues each week.

My name is Kevin Dawson and I am the President of Stock Market Dynamics, LLC.  By trade, I am an accountant and information systems professional with over 25 years experience first as a small business accountant and computer consultant and later as a Corporate Controller and IT Executive.

By 2009, I had been investing in the stock market for the over 15 years and had tried various personal approaches and a few newsletters.  The personal approaches were very time consuming and the newsletters had not been very useful.  In late 2009, I found myself between jobs and with the bad economy and very slow job market, I had a little extra time on my hands and so decided to do some research.  My goal was to refine and automate my personal system so that it was not so time consuming.

While stock screening based on fundamental criteria was readily available for free on the internet, technical screening was not and the data needed to do it myself was expensive.  Actually, the data was available for free but in the past I had only found tools for downloading one stock at a time into Excel which did not help automate the process so I was left to either pay for the data from another source or spend the time to try to figure out how to get it from Yahoo myself.

To my surprise this time around, I actually found a freeware program that downloads the stock market data into a Microsoft Access database for all stocks and indices at once.  Many thanks to Felix Griessenbeck for Quaccess (www.quaccess.com).  In November of 2009 with data now in hand, I began programming the calculations needed to add the technical momentum or timing criteria that I use into my database.  Basically, I needed to program the computer to read the charts and see the things that I look for when I do it visually.  After completing the basic requirements, I began back-testing variations to validate and refine the method.  There is no new "secret" indicator here, just my interpretation of standard charting metrics like moving averages, bollinger bands and the like.

I completed the technical selection criteria to my satisfaction in a few weeks and then set out to add the fundamental selection criteria.  Again, nothing new here.  I use pretty standard fundamental analysis to select "value" stocks that I expect to become "growth" stocks.  The only secrets are what levels I assign to which fundamental metric and then how I calculate my target price.  Unfortunately, the fundamental data was not available historically so I was not able to back-test this part.  Fortunately as I said, it is not new.  I look at intrinsic value using the same "Benjamin Graham" principles as others like Warren Buffett.  I then take my long list of "value" stocks and shorten it to the ones that have the best "growth" fundamentals.

Upon completion of this exercise in December 2009, I then set about formalizing and automating the process.  Effective on December 31, 2009, the last trading day of 2009 and of that week, I began collecting the market data weekly.  Overnight on Friday, Quaccess downloads the daily quote data for the week and the fundamental data as of the end of the week.  My program then extracts the end of week data so that I now have the historical fundamental data back to the beginning of 2010.  My program then calculates my technical signals for each of the indices and stocks for the week and generates reports based on my technical and fundamental criteria.

Over the weekend, I then looked at the general market reports and began researching all of the stocks that the system had signaled to buy and based on this research I came up with a general market outlook and specific buy list for the upcoming week.  I began tracking the portfolio based on this process starting at the market open on the first trading day of 2010, that being January 4, 2010.  I have since repeated this process each week to maintain the portfolio.

I realized almost immediately that the information generated by this process was exactly what I had been looking for in a newsletter but with some improvements.  First, it was more specific and second it was more current.  The newsletters that I tried were extremely difficult to actually follow in real life and it always seemed to me that monthly was not enough and staying on top of the old daily telephone hotlines and now email alerts was too much.  I also found that most of the "content" of the newsletters was useless fluff.  The results of this process are specific and easy to follow and the market and whole portfolio are re-evaluated every week instead of only monthly.

So that is when the idea for Stock-MD came to mind.  I had most of the information that I needed in my database and could add the rest.  I just needed to put it on a single report to make a newsletter and then figure out how to distribute it.  Being weekly and very timely information, the internet and email seemed to make the most sense.  Of course my background is in accounting and business applications, not marketing and the internet, so I was in uncharted territory for me.  I did some research and decided that a hosted membership website would be the best option.  I started with Squarespace (www.squarespace.com) because they had a free trial and inexpensive monthly plans to roll into.  I built a prototype website just to learn how and to figure out the best way to post the information and get subscribers.  I really liked their website builder but unfortunately the membership functionality was not automated and there was no built in email functionality so there was going to be a lot of manual effort.

Being a power user and application designer, I knew the functionality I needed could pretty easily be automated so it was then just a matter of how much it would cost to get it.   So, now that I knew a little more about what I was doing and looking for, I started researching again.  This time around I found MadBeeTech (www.madbeetech.com) which offered most everything that I needed for my initial foray into the membership website realm at a very reasonable price.  Many thanks to Dan Parks Sydow providing the service and support.

The Stock-MD website was launched on March 28, 2010 with the first member joining in April of 2010.