John Reese

John Reese, founder of Validea.com, is the author of The Guru Investor: How to Beat the Market Using History's Best Investment Strategies and a regular columnist for RealMoney.com and Forbes.com.

He is also the founder of Validea Capital Management, a money management firm for high net worth individuals and institutions, and he advises two Canada-based mutual funds (Omega Consensus American & International Equity Funds). John also maintains the investing blog The Guru Investor, which is dedicated to bringing investors the thoughts and ideas of the brightest investment minds in the world.

John has always been actively involved in managing his own money. But after growing frustrated with underperforming fund managers and pundits who offered more hyperbole than help, John began conducting his own extensive research into quantitative investment strategies some 12 years ago.

The goal of his research was to find strategies that had consistently outperformed the market over the long term, and which the average investor could use in a practical way. What John found was that a number of history's greatest investors, including Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett, and Benjamin Graham, had made their fortunes by using approaches that were mostly, if not completely, quantitative.

After studying the works of these and other stock market greats, John used his background in computer science and artificial intelligence to develop the sophisticated yet easy-to-use guru-inspired models offered on validea.com.

John's ultimate goal for Validea.com is two-fold: to help make the strategies of the most successful pros usable and understandable for the individual investor, and to offer investors a systematic investment framework that helps them overcome the emotions and biases that often eat away at long-term performance.

John holds a Master's of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. John resides in West Hartford, Conn., with his wife and their three children.

Validea.com founder John Reese, like many investors, has always been actively involved in managing his own money. Over the years, John became increasingly frustrated with underperforming fund managers and with the difficulty of obtaining quality financial information to help him in his investment decision making process.

As a result, John began to read the books of many of the world's most widely known and successful investors to become more familiar with the criteria these investors use to select quality stocks. John was very impressed by the stock picking strategies he was reading about, but became frustrated with the difficulty in finding and manipulating the data required to put these methodologies into practical use.

One day, it dawned on John that through the Internet, he could not only make analyzing stocks and getting stock ideas using these world renowned strategies easier for himself, he could also share this knowledge with other investors similar to him. John hired several employees who shared his enthusiasm for the idea, and Validea was formed.

Once the website was up and running, John was immediately able to see results, not only in helping him select profitable investments, but also in allowing him to see detailed analysis of how the stock selection strategies reach their conclusion on a criteria by criteria basis.

Despite his positive investment results using the site, John realized there was one piece of the puzzle missing. He wanted concrete historical performance results to show how the methodologies actually perform.

Based on that realization, John, with the help of some computer programmers, ran extensive historical studies on each of the nine methodologies found on the site. The results affirmed what his own investment results had been telling him, these strategies really do work! You don't have to take our word for it though, see the returns of our model portfolios for yourself.

Every day, those of us who work at Validea work hard not to lose sight of John's original goal, to make successful investing easier and more understandable for the average person.