Draft:Mark Matson

Mark Matson (born August 23, 1963) is an American entrepreneur, author, and innovator in the fields of investing science and financial education. He is the founder and CEO of Matson Money, which is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is the creator of educational experiences, platforms, and tools that help make Nobel Prize-winning investing research accessible to investors and can help transform their relationship to money. Most notably, he is the creator of The American Dream Experience and the Matson Method.

Early Life and Education

Born in 1963 in Charleston, West Virginia to young parents Joe and Mary Lou—both children of the “hollers” where the expression “dirt poor” was a reality—Matson was no stranger to financial strain as a youth. On recommendation from the pastor that married his parents, his father started selling life insurance door-to-door to struggling coal miners to support his family.

From an early age, Matson was inspired by his father’s work ethic and felt a desire to follow in his footsteps, building a career on hard work and creating value for others. At age 11, his interest in entrepreneurship and in the psychology of success was ignited as he read Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich, as well as Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.²

Matson received his Bachelor’s degree in Business with a major in Finance and Accounting from Miami University in 1986.²

Career

In 1991, Matson founded Matrix Asset Allocation, which later became Matson Money, with little capital. His company was one early to reject a commissions-based model, which Matson viewed as structurally incompatible with investors’ interests.²

A year later in 1992, Matson attended a debate between the renowned portfolio manager Donald Yacktman and economist Rex Sinquefield on the merits of passive management vs. active management.² Matson said he was profoundly impacted by Sinquefield’s argument that “active management does not make sense theoretically and isn’t justified empirically”.² That put in motion the creation of the Matson Method, which combines empirically tested Nobel Prize-winning investment strategies.

Matson’s investing methodology, the Matson Method, is comprised of three academic investing principles: The Fama-French Three Factor Model, Efficient Market Hypothesis, and Modern Portfolio Theory.

The Fama-French Three Factor Model, developed by Kenneth R. French of Yale University and Eugene Fama, tells us that the market is expected to reward investors for taking risks, especially in equities... more so for small companies... and even more for distressed companies. By leveraging this Three Factor Model and clarifying the factors that impact investment returns, Matson Money’s portfolios are designed and engineered to capture market returns over the long term.

Efficient Market Hypothesis, developed partially on the work of Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama, states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to “beat the market” consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information.

In addition, the Matson Method relies heavily on Modern Portfolio Theory, developed largely by the work of Harry Markowitz, which holds that owning different kinds of financial assets is less risky than owning only one type. Its key insight is that an asset's risk and return should not be assessed by itself, but by how it contributes to a portfolio's overall risk and return.⁶

Because of a reliance on academic investing principles, Matson has also been vocal against market practices like stock picking and market timing, generally advising investors and their advisors to stay fully invested in markets even in bad market cycles.

Publications

Matson published his first book in 2004, The Dirty Filthy Lies My Broker Taught Me And 101 Truths About Money and Investing. In this publication by Matson, he reveals common assertions propagated by the investing industry and what investing can make available for people.  

In 2011, Matson published his second book, Main Street Money: How to Outwit, Outsmart, and Out Invest the Wall Street Bullies. When Mark Matson wrote Main Street Money, he intended to send a wake-up call to the financial world and to investors. He sought to demonstrate how Wall Street was profiting from an antiquated “traditional” system of investing at the expense of the investors and revealed another way of investing that could provide an opportunity to empower the Main Street investor.

The American Dream Experience

Matson is known for incorporating events and peer-to-peer coaching into wealth management. In an article on his approach in 2017, Matson was described as "an RIA, yet his approach screams out sales, yet then again he has created a third category of investor-to-investor peer support. Matson's approach to investors is akin to that of a minister in a Congregationalist church who can train lay preachers."

In order to accommodate more events, in 2016 Matson moved his headquarters from Ohio to Scottsdale, Ariz., securing a 50,000-square foot office on N. Pima Road. The event space there allowed Matson to launch the American Dream Experience in 2017, a two-day investing seminar for advisors and investors, where they learn about the empirically tested academic investing principles that make up the Matson Method.

Matson Money expanded into Canada in 2021. A year later, the American Dream Experience was reimagined into a global initiative, Breakthrough Investing, and the first event was hosted in Vancouver, B.C., in 2022.

In 2023, Matson Money launched The American Dream 401(k)™, which was designed to create a retirement plan based on Matson Money’s investment principles.⁷ Participants in the American Dream 401(k) have access to individualized investor training and development programs such as the American Dream Experience, as well as other ongoing coaching programs.

Personal Life

Mark and his wife Melissa reside in Scottsdale, Arizona. Together, they are the parents of 8 children.