Lesson from the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme

Chad Brand has been actively managing personal and family investment assets since 1992. After the most recent bear market depleted investor accounts between 2000 and 2002, the outrage among the individual investor community was overwhelming. Most of the disgust was aimed at mutual fund managers and stock brokers who had gotten carried away with technology stocks and had abandoned crucial investment disciplines such as diversification and careful valuation analysis. In 2002, Brand officially founded Peridot Capital Management in order to open his knowledge base and portfolio management services to those outside of close friends and family.

Chad received his bachelor's degree in finance from Washington University in St. Louis and has passed the NASD Series 65 Uniform Investment Advisor Examination. Prior to managing money full-time, he worked in the corporate finance department at Express Scripts, Inc (Nasdaq:ESRX), an $18 billion per year pharmacy benefits management company based in St. Louis, MO.

After correctly being bullish on shares of Google when most others were unenthusiastic about the stock's investment merit, Chad was featured in a front page story in The Wall Street Journal on March 2, 2006 which discussed the prospects for the internet search giant. Brand also speaks regularly at the University of Missouri (Columbia) Business School, as a guest lecturer to both undergraduate and MBA level students.

Chad was a weekly columnist for StreetSideInvestor.com in the late 1990's and began publishing his own investment blog in 2004. In fact, The Peridot Capitalist has been named one of the best investment blogs in the U.S. by several sources and Brand has done interviews with the likes of Reuters, Bloomberg Newswires, Business Week, and Forbes. Chad's blog is often referred to on various investment web sites including TheStreet.com, Yahoo! Finance, Seeking Alpha, and Google Finance.