Joey Bess: From 20 Years in Wealth Management to Founding MyTradePilot

From the advisor''s chair to the founder''s desk

For nearly two decades, Joey Bess sat on the same side of the table as retail investors. As an Accredited Asset Management Specialist (AAMS®), he helped families plan retirement, allocate portfolios across market cycles, and navigate the emotional weight that comes with real money on the line. At his peak, he oversaw roughly $100 million in retail assets — a career built on patience, process, and blunt conversations about risk.

But somewhere between the 2020 volatility spike and the meme-stock aftershocks, Joey noticed a pattern the traditional advisory model couldn''t fix: clients who traded on the side had no system to recover from losses. They had strong opinions, decent charts, and no repeatable process. When trades went wrong, they doubled down. When trades went right, they got sloppy. It wasn''t a knowledge problem — it was a discipline problem.

That observation became the seed of MyTradePilot.

Why someone from the advisor world built a trading platform

Advisors are trained to think in frameworks: risk tolerance, position sizing, rebalancing rules, downside scenarios. Retail traders, by contrast, are usually taught in tips: "buy this breakout," "watch this level," "this stock is going to $500." Tips don''t survive contact with a bad month.

Joey''s thesis was simple: bring advisor-grade process to the trader''s desk. Not a signal service. Not a chatroom. A structured environment where:

Every idea gets a written thesis before capital is committed.
Every position has a pre-defined stop and a max-loss dollar figure.
Every result — win or loss — gets logged and reviewed.
Every strategy is stress-tested in a paper environment before it goes live.

That framework became the product. The private course Joey wrote for a small group of clients in 2022 became the MyTradePilot Academy. The risk spreadsheet he''d been iterating on for years became the position-size calculator. The scanner, the journal, the backtest engine — each tool solves a problem Joey watched real people struggle with, in real accounts, with real money.

The philosophy: paper trading is a professional discipline

Most platforms treat paper trading as a beginner phase — training wheels you shed the moment you fund a real account. MyTradePilot treats it the opposite way.

Paper trading is the flight simulator of investing. Professional pilots don''t stop using simulators after they get their license — they use them for the rest of their career, to rehearse edge cases before they matter.

Joey''s platform is built around that principle. Traders can validate new strategies against historical data, run them forward in a paper account for weeks or months, and only then decide whether the edge is real enough to risk capital. AI accelerates the practice loop — surfacing patterns, generating trade theses, suggesting stops — but it never replaces the trader''s judgment. Every decision remains the user''s.

What "credibility" means here

Joey doesn''t post screenshots of green P&L days. There are no guarantees on the site, no "students who turned $500 into $50,000" testimonials, no black-box signal packages. That restraint is intentional — and it''s the same restraint the advisor world spent 20 years drilling into him.

What MyTradePilot offers instead:

Transparent methodology. Every scanner rule, every risk formula, every backtest assumption is documented in the Academy.
Fair pricing. No upsells, no "premium signals" tier. See the full plan comparison.
A written point of view. Read the ongoing blog for Joey''s take on market structure, risk, and the mistakes he watches traders make in real time.

A note on transparency

Joey still holds his AAMS® designation. He is no longer a registered representative with FINRA — by choice. MyTradePilot is an education and research platform, not a registered advisory firm, and nothing on the site should be construed as personalized investment advice. Joey also has a public FINRA BrokerCheck disclosure from 2016 related to the marking of certain trades as unsolicited that were subsequently deemed solicited — a supervisory/marking matter, not a matter involving client harm, fraud, or misappropriation. Full details live on Regulatory Disclosures.

The road ahead

Joey still believes most retail investors are better served by low-cost index funds and a good financial plan than by active trading. But for the subset of people who are going to trade anyway — and there are millions of them — he believes they deserve the same process discipline the advisor world spent 20 years teaching him.

That''s the mission. That''s the whole company.

If that resonates, start a free MyTradePilot account and see the process for yourself. No card required.