Here at My Own Terms, when it comes to matters of money, we believe in transparency and accountability. Day in and day out, we dedicate ourselves to delivering responsible investing ideas and sound financial education. That’s why, when it comes to talking about stocks, we think it’s important that you know exactly where we’re coming from. With this in mind, we have developed a company-wide disclosure policy to guide our business and communications. We call it the My Own Terms Disclosure. We invite you to take some time to read through it, and hope it helps inform your experience here in myownterms.com.
My Own Terms is a company that represents investors teaching and learning from other investors. Many financial publications do not permit their writers and editors to own stocks. My Own Terms not only permits, but also encourages its people to invest in common stock and online courses. Why? Two reasons.
First, we strongly believe the most effective way to create wealth is through the long-term ownership of stocks and learning new skills. We believe in using the stock market as a savings bank, and we strongly encourage learning new skills as much as you can while treating money management as a lifelong endeavor. Therefore, we think it’d be downright mean of us to close that avenue of investment.
Second, and more important, we don’t consider our people to be journalists, but rather communicators and teachers of online education and financial matters. It’s a subtle but critical difference that affects our entire service — from our online site at myownterms.com, to our books, to our nationally syndicated newsletters and portfolio services. As a company, we utilize every available medium to teach people of all ages, all income levels, all backgrounds, and all genetic codes about money and its applications in modern life. Therefore, we believe our peoples involvement in managing their own money is critical to their learning more about the subject and their succeeding in their own lives. And who better to write about investing than those who do it themselves?
My Own Terms writes about stocks, education, crypto, real estate in both free and paid content. We make recommendations in our various premium newsletter services and actually hold some of these shares in our portfolio services. We will disclose our recommendation or ownership until we cease to recommend the stock, or we sell our entire position.
Internally, My Own Terms always strived to operate with the highest levels of integrity and transparency. As such, here are the key components my own term’s disclosure policy:
In addition to the above disclosure requirements, My Own Term’s people work under additional trading restrictions and guidelines. These restrictions require that they:
We have business relationships with an ever-changing assortment of companies, including technology vendors, leasing companies, data providers, banks, distribution channels, advertisers, landlords, accountants, and the restaurants up the street from My Own Term’s HQ. Many of these companies are public companies operating in industries that we follow. There may be instances in which one of our newsletters recommends a company with whom we have a business relationship, or we may write an article about such a company on myownterms.com. These occurrences are unintentional and coincidental, as the business end of My Own Terms has no input or influence on the editorial side of things.
As a general rule, if you see ads from a company on our site and emails, that company is paying us for such placement. Some of the major ones include E*Trade, Fidelity, Scottrade, OptionsHouse, and ShareBuilder, Unified Growth Additionally, companies pay us for inclusion in specific areas of our site.
A portion of our site, branded as The Down And Dirty, writes reviews of personal finance products, including credit cards, mortgage offers, and brokerage accounts. We may receive compensation for offers that appear on The Down & Dirty, including compensation related to placement.
We may issue recommendations for preferred partners that we believe in and/or use ourselves. But keep in mind, this site may not include all available offers from our partners. For example, there are thousands of credit cards available. We’ll highlight a fraction of them. All picks are made at the editorial discretion.
Distribution Partners
Some of our major distribution partners include Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, USA Today, AOL, Nasdaq, and CNN Money.
We have designed our disclosure and trading guidelines to serve our community, our customers, and our people fairly. As always, though, you should remember to consider every piece of investment information you receive, here at the My Own Terms or elsewhere, not as a de facto recommendation, but as an idea for further consideration. Even the strongest disclosure policy in the world does not excuse individuals from taking responsibility for their own decisions. Due diligence, critical thought, and use of the most extraordinary device in the world (the human brain) are crucial to your financial success.
