Free* Investools education About dshort.com This website was launched in February 2005 using a domain name based on my real name, Doug Short. I'm a retired first wave boomer with a Ph.D. in English from Duke. My first career was a faculty position at North Carolina State University, where I achieved the rank of Full Professor in 1983. During the early '80s I got hooked on academic uses of microcomputers for research and instruction. In 1983, I co-directed the Sixth International Conference on Computers and the Humanities. An IBM executive who attended the conference eventually made me a job offer I couldn't refuse. Thus began my new career as a Higher Education Consultant for IBM — an ambassador for Information Technology to major universities around the country. After 12 years with Big Blue, I grew tired of the constant travel and left for a series of IT management positions in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. I concluded my IT career managing the group responsible for email and research databases at GlaxoSmithKline until my retirement in 2006. My interest in economics and financial planning was triggered by the bear market of 1973-74. My wife and I bought our first home in August 1973, a month after our second child was born. Two months later, the Oil Embargo tripled gas prices, and I began commuting to work on a bicycle. During the decade of stagflation that followed, I became increasingly fascinated with economics, finance, and market behavior (my wife claims it's an obsession). Charting financial data is something I've been doing for over 25 years. I was an early user of first-generation spreadsheet software (VisiCalc, SuperCalc, and Lotus 1-2-3), and I participated in the beta program for the original release of Quicken. During the two years prior to my retirement, I earned some certifications from the College for Financial Planning. Now, as a retiree, the dshort.com website gives me a chance to combine several interests — economics, web design, and pro-bono financial counseling. I'm also a contributor to the Motley Fool Rule Your Retirement subscription service. dshort.com is a stand-alone website hand-coded in HTML and JavaScript with my favorite text editor. It may lack some of the bells and whistles provided by a commercial blog service, but I'm totally addicted to the personal touch. Contrary to the assumption of many visitors to dshort.com, I'm not a bearish short seller. The website name is simply a contraction of my real name. It's true that some of my content has been a bit pessimistic over the past two years. But I believe this is a result of economic realities and not a personal bias. For the record, my efforts to educate others about bear markets date from November 2007, as this Motley Fool article attests. In addition to dshort.com, I developed and maintain the website for the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild. Unless I've been coerced into a vacation, I'm usually in the Carolinas — Raleigh, Myrtle Beach, or shuttling between the two. Visitors to this website are welcome to link to, copy, or otherwise distribute my content on condition that a reference to dshort.com is included. Doug Short, Ph.D. Email: doug @ dshort.com