Ian MacDonald

Ian Duncan MacDonald

My skill in analyzing and scoring stocks for safe retirement portfolios is derived from the decades I spent as senior executive in the commercial risk information industry. I lived through that industry's transition from a slow manual gathering of information by reporters to building massive computerized databases that instantly assessed the risks in millions of businesses. With the data being in a computer, it was easy for me to build scoring systems that steered banks, insurance companies and trade suppliers away from making expensive mistakes.

I had joined Dun & Bradstreet after graduating from McMaster University. They employed 8,000 people gathering information on all the businesses in the world. As a credit reporter, I quickly acquired a wealth of business knowledge. Before I was thirty D&B had made me General Manager of a division.

Being ambitious, 10 years later, I joined Creditel, a Dun & Bradstreet competitor. Here, I rose to become the Senior Vice President responsible for generating half the revenue and profits of the company. I soon created my first computerized data gathering and scoring system. Nineteen years later Creditel, was acquired by Equifax, the world's largest international consumer risk reporting service, they wanted to expand into commercial risk assessment.

Upon retiring from Equifax as a Vice President, twenty-two years ago, I saw that the mutual funds, that had been chosen for my retirement portfolio by my investment advisor, had lost USD 300,000 dollars. This loss motivated me to fire the advisor and become a self-directed investor.

I quickly saw that investment risk was just another form of commercial risk. I drew upon my experience and built a stock scoring system that allowed me to choose the best high dividend, financially strong companies for my my portfolio. Quickly, it grew from six figures into seven figures and is still growing. Years go by without my needing to make changes to the twenty stocks in the portfolio.

In 2017 an 80-year-old friend, who had lost hundreds of thousands dollars in the retirement portfolio managed by her investment advisor, asked me for help. She adapted easily to my stock scoring software and to my safe approach to investing. Soon, she had recovered her losses and doubled her income.

She then pushed me to write an investment guide book to help others like her and to provide my stock scoring software free of charge to those book buyers who were worried about the safety of their long-term retirement income. This first book led to seven investment books analyzing and scoring American and Canadian stocks, plus to the creation of hundreds of free weekly "Safe Dividend Investing" podcasts.