Here at The Biz Corps, 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 Biz Corps Disclosure.
Investors Communicating With Investors
The Biz Corps 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. The Biz Corps not only permits, but also encourages its staff to invest in common stock. Why? Two reasons.
First, we strongly believe the most effective way to create wealth is through the long-term ownership of stocks. The stock market has compounded 10% average annual returns over the last century. We believe in using the stock market as a savings bank, and we strongly encourage treating money management as a lifelong endeavor. Therefore, we think it’d be downright mean of us to close that avenue of investment to our employees.
Second, and more important, we don’t consider our employees to be journalists, but rather communicators and teachers of financial matters. It’s a subtle but critical difference that affects our entire service — from our online site at thebizcorps.org, to our investment books, to our nationally syndicated newspaper column, to our 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 staff’s 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?
The Biz Corps writes about stocks in both free and paid content. We make stock 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. Of course, in both free and paid content we will continue to disclose whether the author has an interest in the stocks mentioned.
Internally, The Biz Corps has always strived to operate with the highest levels of integrity and transparency. As such, here are the key components of The Biz Corps’s disclosure policy:
Disclosure
- When a writer writes about a stock that he or she has a position or beneficial interest in, that fact is disclosed at the end of the article.
- If The Biz Corps recommends or holds a position in a stock, that fact is also disclosed at the end of the article.
- All The Biz Corps employees and contractors — that’s anyone with a TBC prefix on their screen names — are required to disclose their current positions, including stocks, mutual funds, and cryptocurrencies.
- Affiliates of The Biz Corps provide individualized investment advice and investment products. These companies may recommend or hold securities mentioned in our publications. Editorial personnel have no knowledge of any affiliates’ holdings and/or specific recommendations, and the affiliates’ personnel have no knowledge of any editorial content before it is published. Our affiliate companies may also have their own disclosure policies, which they may make available on their respective sites.
Trading Restrictions
In addition to the above disclosure requirements, The Biz Corps employees work under additional trading restrictions and guidelines. These restrictions require that they:
- Must hold any stock they own for at least 10 days. (No day trading allowed — as if we’d want to!)
- Cannot write about a stock in the period of 2 market days before to 2 market days after purchasing or selling the stock.
- Must clear trades with our compliance department prior to any transaction.
- Must notify our compliance department every time they buy or sell a stock, regardless of whether they have written about it.
Investors in The Biz Corps
The Biz Corps is grateful to the people that have invested in us. The Biz Corps’s founders and some family members have invested in the company, and full-time employees receive stock options and/or stock in the company.
Business and Technology Partners
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 The Biz Corps. 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 thebizcorps.org. These occurrences are unintentional and coincidental, as the business end of The Biz Corps has no input or influence on the editorial side of things.
It would take too much space to list all the companies that we do business with, and we’d probably forget some anyway, but below are some of our major partners. (This list is most subject to change. We’ll update it periodically, but we will not be able to keep pace with the rate of change.)
Investing Advertisers
As a general rule, if you see ads from a company on our site and emails, that company is paying us for such placement. Additionally, companies pay us for inclusion in specific areas of our site (e.g., Registration Page, Broker Center).
