Donald Cassidy is founder and president of the non-profit educational foundation Retirement Investing Institute (RII). His personal success as an investor allowed him to retire early from corporate employment to form the RII. Before creating that organization, whose goal is to educate investors without exposing them to product-sales pressures, he was senior research analyst at mutual funds tracker Lipper Inc. for 16 years. He provided the bulk of that firm's media commentary, with special focus on the psychology of investing as reflected in mutual funds money-flow data. He also was a weekly radio show guest covering investing in mutual funds for over nine years on Denver radio. Before joining Lipper he was a sell-side analyst for a regional brokerage firm for several years.
Mr. Cassidy is the author of five books for individual investors. Their subjects range from conservative income investing in utilities, to how to sell one's investments at the right times, to technical-analysis topics such as trading using volume signals. The latter insight is based on his long studies of crowd psychology in the behavioral-finance field.
Mr. Cassidy is a cum laude graduate of the Wharton School. He has been a member of the CFA Society of Colorado since 1987, and has served on the CFA Institute's global speakers bureau since 2004, providing lectures on investing topics in the USA, Canada, and Europe. He is also on the speakers bureau of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII), for which he has provided over 180 talks to investors across the USA in the past 14 years. He serves as program chair of AAII's Denver chapter. He also serves as guest lecturer in investments at four Colorado universities and is on the business school curriculum advisory board for a large university based in Denver.