January 13, 2011 WALTHAM, Mass. - As a writer and analyst for The Motley Fool, Matthew Argersinger ’01, MAief  ’02 makes it his mission to break down complicated economic concepts, translate convoluted stock market jargon into simple terms, and - if possible – make investing fun again for small investors.

“Despite what we’ve been through over the past couple of years, investing doesn't have to be hard or scary,” says Argersinger, who has worked at The Motley Fool, the multimedia financial services company that focuses on educating individual investors, for two years. 

“I believe that the lesson of the financial crisis for small investors is simple: keep on investing. Keep putting regular money into the market, whether it's into mutual funds or a 401(k) plan. People who did that this time around are much better off than people who panicked and sold at the bottom. The market rallied, and it will happen again.”

Argersinger writes in punchy, provocative prose. “At the Fool, you’re part analyst, part writer, part investigative journalist, with a little comedian thrown in. My goal is to boil down difficult concepts and make them digestible and concrete. And if I can be funny here and there, all the better.”

After graduating from IBS, he spent five years at the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. In his free time, he contributed to discussion boards on The Fool. In 2007, Motley Fool brought him on as freelancer, and shortly after, he got a full-time job there.

He began in January 2008: an inauspicious time to start reporting on the stock market. “Our main goal is to get small investors to invest in the stock market, but that's difficult to do when the market is crashing and 401(k) plans are being pulverized,” he says. “We managed to find new ways to get people engaged by providing tools to find bargain stocks.”

Argersinger got his first taste of stock market dynamics in an Introduction to Finance class at IBS taught Blake LeBaron, Professor of International Economics. “He could really explain stock market history, and the ups and downs of the economy,” he recalls. “That class gave me a much deeper understanding of how money works.”

In his final semester, he conducted a research project under Professor LeBaron evaluating the usefulness of Wall Street research. He scrutinized hundreds of analyst reports on a range of stocks, and then did a longitudinal analysis over three years to determine whether those buy, sell, and hold ratings held up. “What I found was that analysts’ ratings are universally bad,” he says. “The lesson is that the game is rigged. Small investors have to ignore the noise of Wall Street, and they shouldn’t obsess over short-term rating changes.”

In his spare time, he runs Argersinger Investment Group, which manages a little less than $1 million for a group of small investors. Over the past five years – some of the ugliest time in U.S. stock market history - Argersinger’s fund is up 7.1%, compared with the S&P 500 Index, which is down 3.9% over the same period.

“The great Peter Lynch once said if you can write down on a napkin the five or six things you like about a company, that's enough,” he says. “It’s good advice.”