About StockGuru:

We are entering our fifth year now as Iwrite this in November of 2005. On this page we will share the story of how we became who we are today..

WHAT IS STOCKGURU? WHO ARE WE?

I originally started making stock picks in the late '90s. How could anyone go wrong then? No one did. I developed a small but loyal following of mostly friends and the friends of friends. My picks were usually up and coming companies on the bulletin board or small Nasdaq or Amex stocks. I applied the same fundamentals when looking at the companies as I do today.

Our email list started out quite small, but by the time Y2K came around the list grew to be significant. Even at the time of 9/11 in 2001 the list was alive and well.

In 2003 I formalized the company with the creation of TheStockGuru.com website. This was in the weeks before the second Gulf War. I knew that if the main hostilities were over quickly there would be a huge market rebound and there was. The email list was now branded as “TheStockGuru.com.” Later that summer I bought the name StockGuru.com, as it was clear that members were very confused with the 'The' in front of the name. It turned out that the small move in name designation made a huge difference with our audience.

In July of 2003 we added the paid membership service. Yes, until July of 2003 I had not made a dime off of this entire concept. Even then you could not fill a decent SUV let alone pay a web server to host the site with the money collected from the couple of PayPal donations made in the 30 or so days before the paid membership service was implemented.

All of this time I was working in advertising full time in the Dallas area. This whole 'StockGuru thing' as I called it back then was a sideline to my 'day job' as it was. Well, they always say you are most successful in life when you make your passion (mine is my wife, then stocks) into your life's work. StockGuru suddenly took every waking moment of my life outside of the office. Soon it began to take up time in my office. With my research talking to CEOs and other key execs with these companies StockGuru was definitely spilling over into my daytime.

Anyone that understands our concept here understands that we have our free pick side to the business and the small cap promotional side to the business. That was not the case until we took on the client, Circle Group Holdings. Prior to that we did just non-compensated picks on mostly the Nasdaq or Amex. We had done only a couple on the OTCBB. The promotional side allowed me to make the break and do this full time.

You will notice that there is still a strong division between the non-compensated member picks and the promotional side to the business. One of the great things I get from the promotional side that allows me to benefit paid members is being in the middle of the small cap industry buzz. Just about every minute of the day I hear updates about the next great new thing coming.

Today both sides of the web site are moving along quite well. We extremely value our paid members and have thousands that follow our Guru Picks. On our promotional side, we keep our eyes open for the exception to the rule looking for the companies that truly represent value. These companies are not StockGuru Picks and should be considered primarily as advertisers on the web site. We set a high standard and hold our clients to that standard.

About me:

As I write this, I am a 43-year-old male, married, living in Frisco, Texas (North of Dallas and near Plano, Texas). My wife Monique and I have two sons, Joseph John Pentony and Nicholas Michael Pentony. Joseph is 23 months old and just days away from his second birthday. Nicholas just came into the crazy world on October 6, 2005. My wife is a CPA and I see Joseph as possibly a President. Little Nicholas looks a bit more serious. I think more than likely he will become Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Time will tell for each.

Stock Experience:

I have never looked forward to any profession as being a stockbroker. I was also never more disillusioned with an industry than I was with the brokerage industry. I was licensed as a Merrill Lynch stockbroker in 1988. I was actually in their Princeton Training program about 13 months after the “crash of ’87.” I learned there that it’s not about stocks; it’s about products. It’s not about doing what you think is best; it’s about generating “PC’s.” PC’s are “production credits.” The more you had, the bigger your paycheck. Each trade generated production credits.

Worse than that, the job was a “telemarketing job.” My quota was to dial 400 people a day from various lists. Princeton Training spent much more time on “role playing” with phone calls than it did on what’s best for the client. I worked at one Houston office and then transferred to another. My total Merrill Lynch time was about three years. When I left the industry, I made a firm decision never to go back. Merrill Lynch was supposed to be the best, so the industry held little promise for me.

My own trading started before I was at Merrill where I played various picks that were based off of library research. This was a terrible way to do it, but this was in the days before Al Gore invented the internet. I did more paper trading than I did real trading. I developed theories at that early stage that are still partially useful today. While I have learned a lot since, my early losses taught me more than any book or classroom. One of my lessons learned was to have that sell order in immediately. I have made that a religion, and I consider that part of the buying process. Other lessons: Don’t chase a rising star. (Of course that is a slightly flawed philosophy: Microsoft was one of those rising stars I never held more than a few days).

While I was with Merrill, I was not allowed to play the market. They quickly hushed my trading activity. Apparently a stockbroker’s own account can be brought into litigation should someone sue Merrill Lynch. The very first time I put an order in on my personal account for something that was not “Merrill Lynch Research Approved” I nearly lost my job. Yes, this was in my own trading account. They quashed the trade and really shut me down as a trader for the remainder of my Merrill career.

After Merrill I was out of the habit of trading for a while. I started a newspaper in Houston (weekly in River Oaks / Rice Village area). That consumed me for a year. By about 1994 I began to hear about this thing called the internet. I had ignored it before that. The ability to trade online became particularly interesting to me. I signed up for my first online brokerage account in 1995 and it changed my life. I began trading semi-actively with about two or three trades a month. I began to build a strategy that consistently won. I did not come into this with a lot of money. Trading was an income generator. At first it was a few hundred here and a few hundred there. Hundreds led to thousands, but still I never considered myself to be a day trader alone. I have known too many people that made the jump and washed out as day traders. I kept the day job until – as mentioned above – this 'StockGuru thing' began to work out.

Now It's Team Guru

The biggest change through the years was my development of StockGuru into a company. We now have a staff of researchers, writers and sales people who all work together getting our product out day after day and week after week. The investor relations business is now what we call the promotional side, and our resources there are significant. We have a number of people in India that perform a portion of our stock research for us and a couple of us who discuss each and every member pick before releasing it. All of this works to the benefit of anyone who comes to StockGuru.com.

What’s next for StockGuru?

With the latest version of the site, we have added our “Guru Darkside” for paid members. I was tired of not having an outlet for obvious (and occasionally not so obvious) short plays. These will never include OTC stocks, but will be strictly limited to listed stocks that have turned the wrong way. Most of these picks will be optionable for those who cannot short the stocks.

Members will see more information. We suffered a loss this year of the person we had heading up the paid membership section, Jens Borgwardt. He had spent more than a year as my primary goto person on member picks. He not only made some great suggestions, he did even better follow-up on picks after the fact. He is the kind of person it takes a staff to replace and we are in the process of rebuilding that part of our team.

Promotionally, our goal in 2006 is to work with clients on an annual basis only. That is something we definitely will have to transition into, but this means that we will essentially 'marry' our clients more in the New Year.

Thanks for coming to the site!

John Pentony