
Mary Ellen McGonagle
Senior Managing Director of Stocks
Mary Ellen is the Senior Managing Director of Stocks here at Simpler. She started her career at the ripe age of 21 when she went to work on Wall Street right out of college as an assistant on the Fixed Income trading desk at Goldman Sachs. With all the commotion on the active trading floor and huge amounts of money being traded, it was a very heady experience for the young college grad. She knew she had found her future. After Goldman she took a position at Equitable Life, a large insurance firm highly regarded on Wall Street. She was soon promoted to portfolio manager, with 8 accounts worth over $2 Billion. It was here that Mary Ellen learned how BIG money institutions had access to high-level intelligence that individuals did not have.
After 8 years of peak performance for her clients, Mary Ellen left New York City for Los Angeles to take a position with the famed William O’Neil + Co, the founder of Investor’s Business Daily. Mary Ellen’s work regularly involved analyzing hundreds of data points on thousands of stocks to determine which were healthy and poised to take off. For 15 years, Mary Ellen was one of only about 20 people in the world to have weekly meetings and intra-week meetings with Bill O’Neil where her skills were tested by the master himself.
She’s been in the trenches’ through many market cycles… The Tech Bubble, the 2002 Recovery, the 2008 Banking Crash, and the 2009 Recovery.
After advising top portfolio hedge and mutual fund managers for 20 years, Mary Ellen turned her attention to independent investors. You can find her analysis in her bi-weekly newsletter MEM Edge and appearances in the Options Gold room. Mary Ellen knows what to look for - combining fundamental and technical information with a heavy dose of intuition and 20 years as the trusted advisor to the advisors.