Hi, my name is Eric Smith. Together with Joseph Simko, we created the decision-assistance technology that powers Rita℠.  Neither of us is from the financial services industry. 

While Joe is the Chief Technology Officer of Decision Technologies Corporation, the “tech guy” who played the key role in writing the code, I identified the problem that needed to be solved and designed a way to do so.   

You see, I spent much of my professional life as an attorney, continually referring my clients into the financial services marketplace for investments and financial products.  Not surprisingly, they would bring the recommendations back to me and ask: “What do you think, Eric?”   

My truthful response was: “How should I know? I have no better to way to ‘look behind the curtain’ than you do to see why these three are being recommended, as opposed to a thousand other choices.”   

How and why those recommendations were selected was never clear and the “process” (if there actually was one) was almost entirely opaque.  This might not have been a problem, if the results had been great, but that was too often not the case, leaving my clients disappointed or worse. 

Reflecting on this, I was shocked one day by the realization that virtually all my clients really had only one question . . . a very basic and obvious question, but one that no one seemed to be asking much less trying to answer.   

It was simply this: “Of all the available choices, which one is best for me?” 

That question lingered unanswered, subconsciously for years before an answer bubbled to the surface that led to the creation of a patented, decision-assistance technology that would do three things that virtually everyone had believed to be impossible.  It enables the user (you), in mere moments, to: 

1. Cut through all the “noise” in the market – the bewildering volume of advertising and marketing materials that make trying to figure out what is best for you so paralyzingly difficult, if not impossible; 

b. Filter out all conflicts of interest, both known and unknowable – conflicts that can too often corrupt investment recommendations and degrade your investment results; and,  

c. Use the tremendous amount of available information to comparatively evaluate available mutual fund and ETF choices in a manner specific to your own individual needs, goals, and preferences.  

By enabling you to select, prioritize, and weight performance factors according to their importance to you, Rita℠ permits you to score and rank hundreds of choices and see which have been the best, over time, at producing the results you’re seeking.  You’ll now be able to answer the key question posed above and both personalize and optimize your investment selections in a way never before possible.    

Why hasn’t this been done before?   

The reason should be obvious. The financial services marketplace is vendor-dominated and has been since its inception.  

The sale of investment products is the motivating force driving it. Competition among these vendors often involves incentives designed to ensure the preferential recommendation and sale of one vendor’s products over those of other vendors, and these incentives are often hidden for one very compelling reason – there is nothing about any of this that is good for you, the individual investor.  

Why would any of this change?   

Why would vendors of investment products want investors to have a way to know that potentially better products than theirs exist, let alone actually help investors identify and select them?  

Clearly, they wouldn’t. The inability of individual investors to comparatively evaluate the choices available to them simply helps preserve and protect a status quo in which vendors have essentially been all-powerful.  

Our Goal is to change this – to transfer the balance of power way from the vendors of financial products and into the hands of individual investors, where we believe it has always belonged. This is a big step beyond “financial literacy.”  

This is financial empowerment and the beginning of a movement to beneficially change the way the financial marketplace works.  We hope you will join us, spread the word, and help us make this beneficial change possible. 

And, just to be clear, this is not to suggest that your investment advisor is a “bad person.”  

No. We believe that most likely do care about their clients and wish to do what’s best for them. The problem is often not them, but the practices of the financial services industry itself and the organizations within which the advisors work.  

In other words, the simple fact is that many advisors (perhaps including yours) cannot recommend or offer you anything other than what on the “approved list” of the company that employs them.  

Unfortunately, there is no way for any of us individual investors (or, too often, even our advisors) to “vet” how those lists are constructed or to change them.  

This is why we are also approaching investment advisors with a more sophisticated, “professional version” of Rita℠– our “Professional RapidReview Tool ℠” (“ProRRT ℠”) – to enable them to ensure that what they are recommending is prove-ably in their clients (your) best interests.  

If your investment advisor has not yet heard of this, please do them the favor of mentioning this to them – doing so could help not only them but you (and their other clients) as well, perhaps dramatically.