John Feingold is Co-Founder and Director of Research at Mecox Bay Research, the independent research firm he co-founded with Michele McGovern to publish The Stock Trend Report — a rules-based market trend publication for self-directed investors. The publication reflects a question John has pursued for nearly five decades: can a systematic investment process help investors stay disciplined, reduce emotional decision-making, and participate in markets successfully.
Education
John attended the Ethical Culture School in New York — an institution that takes its name seriously.
He went on to earn a B.S. from MIT and a Master of Science in Management from MIT's Sloan School. In between, he spent a junior year at Harvard in a sincere attempt to become well-rounded. It did not work. He returned to MIT a confirmed finance enthusiast and computer devotee — which, as it turned out, was the more valuable outcome. John also taught “Investment Banking and Financial Markets” as a Visiting Lecturer at MIT Sloan School.
MIT Thesis
His master's thesis was supervised daily by Fischer Black and formally approved by Robert Merton, then head of the Finance Department at Sloan. The question it posed: Can a systematic, rules-based approach to investing consistently outperform the market? — was backed by six years of hand-collected data and FORTRAN programs he wrote himself, loading each run from boxes of punch cards. The results strongly suggested that a disciplined, rules-based strategy could add value — a finding that shaped the way he thought about markets for the next five decades.
“A Reevaluation of the Value Line Investment Strategy” — MIT Sloan, January 1979. hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29841
It is a question he never stopped asking — and still asks today.
Career
John began his Wall Street career at Lehman Brothers, then moved to Salomon Brothers, where he served as a Managing Director and helped build and lead one of the firm's newly created Collateralized Mortgage Obligation trading desks — at a time when the CMO market was genuinely new territory. He subsequently led institutional mortgage investment businesses as a portfolio manager and department head, and was involved in the formation and management of his own hedge fund. Across nearly five decades in markets, he developed deep experience in risk management, fixed income, derivatives, and institutional investment process — and a clear-eyed view of the gap between what investment theory recommends and what investors actually do under pressure. He also learned that sometimes the hardest part of investing is not finding an idea; it is staying disciplined when markets become uncomfortable. The Stock Trend Report is his answer to that problem: a rules-based, systematic approach built to remove emotion from the equation.
— Mecox Bay Research LLC · The Stock Trend Report · mecoxbayresearch.com