Who we are

Al Bentley Founder & CEO

The Genesis

After graduating from university and starting my career as a naval architect, I found myself captivated by the fascinating world of the stock market. Every spare moment was devoted to self-education, I immersed myself in reading and understanding its mechanics.

However, I encountered a challenge—the principles of long-term investing that I had embraced proved difficult to implement. Countless hours were spent scouring various websites, investor presentations, and filings to locate the relevant data, which I then had to compile into my own spreadsheets. Nothing was trustworthy, I ended up needing to manually calculate simple things such as PE ratio just to ensure it was comparable across two companies.

The web was inundated with articles and stock market data, but it only added to the confusion rather than providing clarity.

I soon realized that one of the primary reasons for this issue was the prevalence of advertising or transaction-focused platforms who don’t particularly benefit from boring long term investors who hold for decades and trade infrequently.

As a child I’d been obsessed with computers and programming. I loved making games and apps and by age 14 had begun publishing them online with hundreds of thousands of downloads. My first instinct when I came across a new problem was to build a solution. I began experimenting with ideas that revolved around visualizing the insights and data that mattered most to long-term investors.

The Idea

The magnitude of the opportunity became apparent as I kept tinkering and testing. Millions of individuals worldwide teach themselves to invest and embark on the journey of building a stock portfolio, but often they don’t succeed. The principles of long term investing sound easy on paper but they are difficult to implement in practice.

In 2014 my dream came true to turn Simply Wall St from a side project into a full-time gig. My goal was to create a product that embodied the principles of long term investing, one that cut through all the noise, that stays consistent and unbiased. I wanted to leverage visuals to make understanding insights and spotting trends easy and curate only what is important.

The Vision

Simply Wall St exists to enable individuals to succeed at stock investing and achieve their financial goals. The stock market offers an exceptional opportunity for wealth-building. With a vast selection of businesses to choose from, becoming a shareholder means the business is working to grow for you continuously, even while you sleep.

However it's tempting to try and rush it, to get rich quick. Examples of this occur from time to time and our brains are tempted to think we can replicate it. But this rarely works, and in reality the only way to achieve reliable success is to take a long term approach. The wealthiest individuals in the world typically became rich as shareholders, often in businesses they founded, but this achievement required decades of perseverance through various challenges and fluctuations.

The Approach

To be a great long term investor, you need to follow three principles:

• Think in decades not months

• Be objective and independent

• Continuously learn and improve

Simply Wall St revolutionizes long-term investing by guiding individuals at every stage of building their stock portfolio through a platform designed for their success. One that is intuitive, objective and most importantly without the noise and hype.