How Long Has Your Firm Been in Business? What's Your Company History?

Q: "Your site is exactly what I have been looking for! However, there are many scam sites on the internet. 

"Your site reports its founding in 1998. However, your website seems to have only been up and running for a few years. It looks to me like you are just starting. Can you explain that?

"What other assurances can you provide before I invest $$$ using any of your strategies?"
 

A: I understand your concern about rogue internet sites. Unfortunately, in our modern world, we must all guard against digital miscreants. However, we're happy to answer your questions and provide you with third-party documentation of our company's track record. We are very proud of our long history of success in serving thousands of satisfied clients.

The reason for our relatively limited presence on the internet compared to our time in business since 1998 is that in 2017, we changed our website to the current one, ETFOptimize.com, after operating a stock and ETF website since 2004.

We made this change because our product line evolved from a stock and ETF-based website to a site exclusively focused on Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We made this change because of the clear superiority of ETFs when used in conjunction with quantitative investment strategies—our competitive advantage when compared to others. 

We've informed the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and pertinent regulatory agencies about our company and website name change, and the BBB has tracked our firm for the last 23+ years. During all those years, the BBB recorded ZERO customer complaints and gives us an A+ rating. Please see this link to confirm our BBB report for yourself: https://www.bbb.org/us/co/denver/profile/investment-advisory-services/etfoptimizecom-0885-90020046

Company History

After a career in investment banking and equity analysis with well-known investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, BofA Merrill Lynch, and Drexel Burnham Lambert, our founder, Christopher Michaels, launched the first-ever online, quantitative-investment-subscription service in 1998, when the internet was still in its formative stages. By 2000, the first online, rules-based ETF model, the S&P 500 Conservative Strategy was added to accompany our stock-based product line. 

Not surprising to us, the ETF strategy was our biggest draw, and by the mid-2000's  – as a result of customer demand – we were slowly becoming a site specializing in Exchange Traded Funds. In 2006, we added five sophisticated ETF models to our existing lineup of stock and ETF Strategies. We believe the reason our ETF models were so popular is that ETFs are inherently configured to work well with quantitative strategies. By 2016, it was becoming evident to everyone that our site name was a limiting factor in our future growth and needed to be changed.

In 2017, a crucial meeting was held in which management decided to focus exclusively on using Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in our systematic models and to change our website name to ETFOptimize.com. It was apparent that quantitative ETF strategies were the direction of the future. By a 3-to-1 margin, our ETF-based strategies had already become our subscriber's preference over our stock-based models. Our research also found that ETF models performed far more consistently in quantitative strategies than models based on individual stocks.

Every day, more investors recognize that ETFs offer the advantages of instant diversification, elimination of individual company risk, far lower trading costs, tax advantages, and other benefits that make them superior to individual stocks. As a result, the ETF market is growing by leaps and bounds - at a rate of about 25% per year, while individual-stock investing has plateaued and may soon be declining. Today, much of the volume in individual stocks is a result of the creation of additional ETF shares (which are based on diversified stock indices). Learn more about the many advantages of ETFs here.

Limited Social Media Presence

So far, we have done minimal marketing for ETFOptimize, and the source of most of our customers is word-of-mouth or articles that we occasionally publish in outside media such as SeekingAlpha.com, ETF.com, ETFTrends.com, and others. However, we do maintain a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can find links to our social media sites on the top-right corner of most of the pages of our website; ETFOptimize.com.

Instead of spending truckloads of money on marketing and advertising (which would result in higher prices for our customers), we rely on positive word-of-mouth in the industry and among the investing public to bring investors to our door. Because we have been in business for more than 20 years and have an established base of clients, this provides very satisfactory growth for us. We have very low customer turnover, and in fact, we have only experienced a handful of subscriber cancellations since 2017, when we launched ETFOptimize as a stand-alone site, putting all of our focus on ETFs. We attribute this robust customer-retention to the consistently exceptional performance of our proprietary ETF strategies.

Independent Verification

For independent verification of our track record, we suggest accessing the Better Business Bureau (BBB) report on ETFOptimize.com at this link: https://www.bbb.org/us/co/denver/profile/investment-advisory-services/etfoptimizecom-0885-90020046.

The BBB opened a file on our company in 2004 when the firm relocated to Boulder, Colorado. In 2017, we asked the BBB to change the website they referenced for our company from the old name to ETFOptimize.com. If you take a moment to view the Better Business Bureau report, you'll see that (to date) we have not had a single customer complaint in all the years since 2004, and the BBB rates us with an A+.

We hope to keep this record intact for many years into the future by providing exceptional investment strategies for our subscribers and to continue over-delivering on our commitment to your success.