Outlet profile

Schaeffer's Investment Research

U.S. financial/options-trading research (apolitical, contrarian market-sentiment focus)

Owned byPrivately held by founder Bernie Schaeffer, who is chairman and CEO. The firm is based in Cincinnati, Ohio. I found no public record of outside investors or a parent company.

FundingPaid newsletter and advisory subscriptions, options-trading education products, and premium services sold to retail investors. It also earns money from advertising and marketing for its own products.

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

Bernie Schaeffer founded the firm in 1981 with Bob Bergen. Both men were actuaries at Great American Insurance in Cincinnati who traded options on the side. At the time few newsletters covered options, and none covered only options, so they aimed at small investors and market professionals. The firm grew into a research and education business offering newsletters, trade recommendations, market commentary and a website with options data and analysis. Its approach is built around sentiment analysis and a contrarian view, meaning it looks at how crowded investor optimism or pessimism is and often reads extremes as signs of reversal. Like most paid trading-advice firms, it promotes its own services and track record, and readers should treat performance claims in its marketing with caution and check them independently. It is not a news organization in the traditional sense and has no clear partisan editorial line. Its content is market-focused, so any administration-related coverage is limited to market impact. I did not find evidence of ownership changes or major controversies in the sources I checked.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-11-01; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record