Our mission is to simplify trading and help you avoid chart exhaustion! We do that with tools that will reduce your screen time and anxiety levels, and show better results. Under the hood, it’s math. But, you won’t see the sausage-making, you’ll just see a more peaceful path to trading and investing open up.
How did we get here?
We are a small team of trading enthusiasts. Prior to Upside Signal, we spent 24 years building an Internet business serving both businesses and consumers. We started it in 1997, back when the tools were crude and simple, coding HTML by hand. Now, they call that era Web 1.0.
We barely survived the .com crash of 2000. We ground away in that business for many years, marginally profitable, never giving up. In 2008 and again in 2012 it nearly went down the drain. But, we were making a name for ourselves and serving the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies in addition to the smallest nonprofits and governmental organizations. We were a seemingly successful Web 2.0 company even as we struggled financially. Occasional “Thank you for changing my life” testimonials from users and the ability to work from home kept us rolling onwards. Being around our kids as they grew up was priceless!
Eventually, after about 20 years, we started to accumulate cash in the business. We were too busy and too overwhelmed to manage our cash properly for the first two years that we had excess. But we were aware that the cash was losing value. We knew inflation was higher than government statistics, because we saw home values going up and were raising our prices steadily in the business. We started putting some of the treasury cash into bank CDs with staged maturities and we felt grand earning thousands of dollars a month in interest!
Then the CD rates fell to zero. We wanted to put our cash into some investment but we were a C Corp. and had stockholders. We felt an obligation to our investors to keep our cash invested conservatively. You might be thinking, why not park your cash in the stock market? Stock prices seemed extraordinarily overvalued and ready for a big correction. We are survivors of two big market crashes, so it always feels to us like we’re on the verge of the third! There seemed to be no solution to the cash problem.
A couple low-ball offers came in on the business during this time and we wanted to sell, but how could we exchange a seemingly eternal paycheck / job security for a chunk of money with no safe way to invest it?
Finally in 2021, a private-equity backed competitor engaged in a rollup strategy, came along with an offer big enough for us to take the risk on finding ways to make our money productive. Our competitor borrowed the money to buy us (called a leveraged buyout) and we got to work right away studying how to invest for retirement.
Virtually all of our eggs had always been in the business. That’s another way of saying, we never took enough out of the business to have personal investments. So we had no investing experience, to speak of, in March ’21 when the acquisition happened. But our YouTube stream was full of interesting bitcoin videos.
Several years prior we had been fleetingly interested and purchased $1,000 of ETH. Crypto tanked right after and we just quit looking at it. After reviving our meta-mask account, it turned out the ETH was now worth over $3,000. Hmmm… yes!! So, we made it our full-time job to learn more.
But getting up to speed on trading, crypto and investing in general has been an enormous and complex task. With UpsideSignal.com, we aim to simplify this journey for you so that it can be easier, more profitable and involve far fewer costly mistakes! Our Bitcoin Rationality Index is the starting point.
Now you can see the roots of our fascination with cash flows, interest rates, inflation rates, store of value and start-up life. These roots run deep, all the way from Web 1.0 to 3.0 and from young and single, to married with kids in college!
What we hope you will take away from this story is that we are builders and developers with an eye on the long run who will never sacrifice integrity for short run gains. We are here to ride with you on the biggest wave since the birth of the Internet. Above all we are here to create value for you and to serve you. The rest takes care of itself!
Oh, and we know money doesn’t buy happiness, but it can buy some peace of mind. And peace of mind is fertile ground for happiness… it’s a good starting point. We look at money as a store of energy, a store of potential in your life. The more you have, the greater the choice and possibility open to you. Our mission is to help you build your personal store of life energy in the way that’s just right for you
