My Story

Hi, I am Tim McCarthy, and I am the creator, architect, and developer for Tim's Stock Lists. I have been in the software engineering field as a developer and architect for over 25 years. But I wasn't always a software engineer...

I went to college on an NROTC scholarship, attended Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia after my junior year, graduated from college the following spring, and was commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps. I spent 5 years in the Marine Corps, but during my last year in, I decided to go to night school and get my MBA, since I could get tuition assistance from the VA if I took classes while I was still on active duty. One of the things that I really loved about getting my MBA was doing financial analysis on companies, and I started reading lots of books on the topic and also started reading any type of financial publication that I could get my hands on. I started learning more about investing and became hooked on it.

I ended up finishing my MBA almost at the exact same time that I got out of the Marine Corps, and I got a job right away using my new MBA degree at a marketing research company. What I quickly found out was that they needed my computer skills that I had developed while in the service and while getting my MBA more than my marketing research skills. So I was put in charge of their accounting and IT departments, and soon discovered that I liked working with code and databases and that I wanted to do this full-time. After about a year, I left, and went to work at a computer training company, and soon started gobbling up courses in the topics that I was interested in, mainly databases and software development. About a year later, I took a job at another company, but this time doing both consulting and teaching software development classes to people looking to get their Microsoft solution developer and database certifications. Since that job, I have gone on to work for several other Microsoft partners helping their Fortune 500 customers build software systems on top of the Microsoft technology stack, and in the last several years, Azure and the cloud.

While laser-focusing on software development and software architecture over the years, I still never lost my passion for stocks and financial analysis. I did not spend as much time on it as I used to spend, mostly due to my day job, moonlighting doing developer gigs, and trying to be a husband and a father. But over the past few years, I slowly started getting back into investing again, and suddenly realized that I really needed to use my gifts as a software engineer and apply them to my other passion, investing.

As a result of this epiphany, I have dedicated hundreds to thousands of hours of my time building this app which helps me analyze stocks in a much more efficient way. My goal is to share this creation that I made with my own blood, sweat, and tears with others who enjoy investing as much as I do, but who maybe don't have the time to pore over the financial reports of thousands of companies in hopes of trying to find a good company to invest in or good options trade opportunities. Or, who also may not have the software development skills required to automate the process of analyzing thousands of stocks on a daily basis.

I am the #1 customer of this app, and I use it every day to help me make my investment decisions. I am constantly trying to make it better, so I can in turn make better investment decisions for myself. I hope you enjoy it and I hope that it helps you in your own investment journey.

I am also deeply interested in the opinions of my customers who use this site, and I am in a constant quest to make it better. If you have a suggestion of a feature you would like me to add, please let me know!

Sincerely, Tim