Sy was Chief Engineer and Vice-President of manufacturer Lewis & Saunders Inc., in Laconia, NH. for seven years in the early 1970s. He left NH to found Cametrics Inc., in Woodbury, CT. He built that high-tech manufacturer substantially over a five-year period. It was then acquired by a Wall Street firm.
Back in NH, and after a two-year ‘sabbatical’, he founded Scotia Technology Corp. in Laconia, and also rapidly built it into a sizable manufacturing company over the next five years. It was then acquired by a NYSE listed company in the mid 1980s.
After another two-year sabbatical, Sy’s interest turned to investing and markets.
With his experience being in engineering and business management, it was natural that his approach to investing would involve both the technical aspects of the economy and markets, and analysis of the fundamentals of financial reports, corporate goals, products, managements, markets, and the economy.
With an engineering mindset for details, and the need to know how things worked, it was also probably inevitable that he would study the history of markets in great detail, in an effort to find out what had worked in the past, and more importantly what had not.
Finally satisfied with what he had learned, in 1988 he founded Asset Management Research Corp., which for 22 years has been providing economic and market research to financial institutions and serious individual investors, beginning with an investment advisory newsletter, and expanding it into a financial website when the Internet was made more publicly available in the mid-1990’s.
In 1991, he also founded Harding Capital Management Inc., and managed accounts for several hundred private clients until 1997, out-performing the benchmark S&P 500 in most of those years. In 1997, Harding stopped managing money for others to focus on converting the firm’s newsletter into a comprehensive financial website advisory service to take advantage of the Internet and its potential to become an important method of providing financial research information in greater quantity and detail than could be incorporated in a newsletter.
His Street Smart Report Online now has subscribers in 34 countries around the world.