About Us

Our Company

InvestorsObserver has provided options-oriented analysis, research tools, and information to individual investors since 2002. Our company also provides equity-options content to independent research giant Standard & Poor’s and its clients. We hold several patents on technological innovations we developed to make options trading easier, less risky, and more accessible to the average investor.

Our goal is to demystify the world of options trading for the individual investor, provide example trading strategies that can make healthy profits in any market conditions, and give members the tools they need to secure their financial futures.

Our Team

InvestorsObserver has a dedicated staff of analysts and programmers with years of experience in the options markets. While we come from varying backgrounds and have different areas of expertise, we share a desire to provide the best information, analysis, and tools to our members.

Brent Archer

Brent Archer
Content Director

Email: barcher@investorsobserver.com

Brent is an options analyst, writer, and editor who has been with the Fresh Brewed Media family for seven years. He manages several successful model options portfolios for InvestorsObserver including the 3-Way Managed Risk portfolio, in addition to writing articles geared toward helping the individual investor trade options in a safe and profitable manner.

Brent is at heart a numbers guy who lives to dig through option chains and sift through hundreds of potential trades to find the best ones available. He received his undergraduate degree from Drew University in Computer Science and has been instrumental in the development of InvestorsObserver’s proprietary options research technology that can help identify ideal options trades for almost any stock. These tools are used by investors at firms like Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and Ameriprise through InvestorsObserver’s partnership with Standard & Poor’s.

He is one of the more conservative members of our team and looks for trades and strategies with a very low possibility of losing money, but still have returns well-better than the average index fund or high-yield CD. Brent likes to trade covered calls in his retirement account as a way to increase his profits on relatively stable dividend-paying stocks.

His goal is to help individual investors discover the power of using options to protect themselves from market volatility without giving up the potential for profits.

Michael Fowlkes

Michael Fowlkes
Options and ETF Analyst Writer

Email: mfowlkes@investorsobserver.com

Michael is a financial writer that has been with the Fresh Brewed Media Family for 8 years. Over the course of his tenure with Fresh Brewed Media, he has worn many hats, including portfolio manager, options analyst, and writer.

Michael received his undergraduate degree from Virginia Tech in Accounting and got his start in finance working as a stock trader for six years at Chase Investment Counsel in Charlottesville, VA.

His focus is on financial writing, using his market experience to present the news in a way that the average investor can digest. His articles typically cover big-picture events and forecasting what impact they will have on the stock market as well as coverage of ETF options. In addition to writing for Fresh Brewed Media, Michael also wrote for AOL's BloggingStocks for 3 years, focusing most of his attention on the energy and technology sectors.

Michael is not adverse to high-risk investing when he believes the risks are worth the reward, but in adverse market conditions he takes a more conservative approach. His believes a focus on high-dividend investing offers the safest play given the uncertain global economy.

Bobby Raines

Bobby Raines
Options Analyst Writer

Email: braines@investorsobserver.com

Bobby is a former journalist who worked at a mid-sized daily newspaper for several years before shifting gears and spending the years before and during the financial crisis writing about financial institutions.

This experience gave him a profound understanding of the imbalance between the way institutions invest and what individual investors do with their money. While individuals can’t become too big to fail or borrow interest free from the Federal Reserve, they can use some of the tactics that institutional traders use to make money regardless of market conditions.

Like everyone at InvestorsObserver, Bobby is interested in finding ways to make solid returns without losing money. While not always a huge risk taker, he is not afraid to go against the grain for the right balance of risk and reward.

He manages the Dividends Plus model portfolio for Standard & Poor’s Options Research. He writes feature articles focused on helping experienced options investors find outsized returns as well as timely trade ideas and updates found in the InvestorsKeyhole service.

Bobby also serves as a writer and editor for MarketIntelligenceCenter.com, where the focus is on making trades on the day’s events without follow the crowd.

Kevin Kersten

Kevin Kersten
Options Analyst Writer

Email: kkersten@investorsobserver.com

Mr. Kersten is an investor, writer and analyst who likes to dig down into the risk and reward of complex option strategies. He has managed portfolios, blogged about stocks, helped develop proprietary options reports, composed stock reports, conducted online webinars and written extensively about options since 2004.

Kevin’s favorite investment strategies include bull-put credit spreads and covered calls. He loves taking a complex strategy and breaking it down in an easy-to-understand way so investors new to options trading can understand the risk, rewards, and returns.

Mr. Kersten has a bachelor in Business Administration from University of South Florida where he minored in economics. After working as a manager at a fortune 500 company for a few years he realized he loved playing around with numbers, in addition to people-watching. Economics is right up his alley, since it is the study of how people utilize resources and behave in the free markets. He enjoys watching the numbers come in, spotting trends, and looking for ways to position investments to minimize risk. While Mr. Kersten realizes there are risks in life, he is very calculating about which risks are right to accept.

Kevin has traveled the globe extensively, giving him an outside perspective on US and International markets. When he is not playing around with spreadsheets, his hobbies include camping, hunting, chess, and photography.