Trindle Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley

Dean founded Trindle Wealth Management with a singular purpose in mind – to help clients retire with confidence that they will not outlive their assets.

To fulfill this mission, Dean has built a team of professionals who have worked with him to develop a data-driven, unemotional asset management approach. This approach seeks to help clients preserve the assets they have worked a lifetime to accumulate and generate income for retirement expenses, not simply beat a market index.

Many of Trindle Wealth Management’s clients are other Morgan Stanley Financial Advisors who realize that Dean’s strategy is distinctive among asset managers. Dean, however, has a long history of marching to a different drummer. While at Merrill Lynch in the 1980s, he was among the firm’s first Financial Advisors to switch from a commission-based to a fee-based pricing model. He was also an early proponent of discretionary investment management. “I realized that these approaches enabled me to react more quickly to changing market conditions, while providing all our clients in the block with the same price at the same time,” he says.

A graduate of Purdue University with a degree in Chemical Engineering, Dean began his career at Procter & Gamble where he worked in product development for fledgling brands that are now household names – Bounty and Bounce, for example. Eleven years later, he decided to take a more entrepreneurial career approach and joined Merrill Lynch as a Financial Advisor. His first clients were all Procter & Gamble retirees who had participated in the firm’s profit-sharing program and, in many cases, owned thousands of shares of P&G stock. “Nobody was helping them determine what to do with all their holdings,” explains Dean. “That’s how I decided to build my practice and by 2009 when I moved to Morgan Stanley, all my clients were retirees seeking a prudent approach to managing their assets.”

Dean and Trindle Wealth Management have received a number of accolades over the years. Dean is included in the Forbes Top Wealth Advisors 2021 and Barron’s Top 1200 Advisors 2021. Trindle Wealth Management is one of the few Financial Advisor teams to be approved as a Registered Representative with the NFL Players Association.

A long-time Cincinnatian, Dean is an ornithology enthusiast and has led bird walks at Cincinnati Nature Center. He and his wife Donna have four grown children, two of whom work with him at Trindle Wealth Management, and seven grandchildren.

D.J. has long been aware of the dedicated mission that guides Trindle Wealth Management. “Our clients are retirees who are entrusting us with a huge responsibility,” he explains. “They are depending on us to help preserve the assets they’ve worked a lifetime to accumulate and provide them with the paycheck they no longer receive from their employer.”

To help fulfill this mission, D.J. has developed several proprietary tools that guide Trindle Wealth Management’s buy and sell decisions. His Red Flag/Green Flag tool tracks each investment’s performance in real time and signals when to sell a position or take a profit. His Risk Management software uses quantitative analysis to categorize stocks as Moderate Risk, Higher Risk and Speculative. Together, these tools provide clients with an unemotional, data-driven management approach that was created with their unique needs in mind.

The son of Trindle Wealth Management founder Dean Trindle, D.J. didn’t grow up assuming that he and his father would someday work side-by-side. After graduating from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in Physics, D.J. remained on the west coast where he managed one of Bank of America’s early computer facilities and served as an editor at a major gaming company for twelve years. When he finally returned to Cincinnati and joined Trindle Wealth Management, he immediately went to work on the systems that have become an integral component of the team’s distinctive management approach. He also continued his education by earning the prestigious Certified Portfolio Manager (CPM^®) designation from Columbia University.

D.J. is an enthusiastic member of the Mercantile Library in downtown Cincinnati. He and his wife Alessandra reside in the Queen City with their two teenaged children, Grace and Grant.

Christy, as she likes to call herself, has assumed a number of important roles for Trindle Wealth Management since joining the team in 2009. She has helped develop comprehensive financial plans that have provided clients with recommendations for pursuing goals in virtually every area of their financial lives. As the team’s focus shifted to asset management, she has presented its unique strategy to Morgan Stanley Financial Advisors and their clients. Finally, Christy meets with clients regularly to review performance and has become the team’s digital marketing specialist.

The daughter of team founder Dean Trindle, Christy didn’t set out to pursue a financial services career. “I was under the mistaken impression that finance was all about spreadsheets and securities analysis,” she explains. “It was only after working as a loan officer after college that I realized how much more is involved. I felt that I was actually helping people craft their dreams. I had to understand what they were really trying to achieve and how I could help them realize their ambitions.”

Christy is a graduate of Western Oregon University with a degree in Social Sciences. Outside the office, she and her husband Roy have become marching band enthusiasts, following their three kids to games, competitions and other musical events. The family resides in West Chester.

Marc is a rarity among Morgan Stanley’s Wealth Management Associates. He is an IT professional with extensive experience in building and managing networks and databases for numerous companies in the tri-state area. Since joining Trindle Wealth Management in 2003, he has designed the team’s trading program that builds blocks for all accounts and their positions. In addition, he has developed a system to monitor positions that new clients wish to maintain and determine when they should be sold for profit or to help avoid potential losses.

A native Cincinnatian, Marc started his own successful wholesale flooring business after graduating from high school in 1972. By the 1990s, it was the largest company of its kind in the area, but by then, Marc had found a new interest that was to become his passion, The advent of personal computing and the internet was changing the way his customers conducted their business. Marc taught himself how to write code, recover lost data and build databases. It was then he changed careers and joined Merrill Lynch where he built databases for many of the firm’s branch offices. It was there he met Dean Trindle, joined his team and transitioned to Morgan Stanley in 2009.

Active in his community, Marc has donated thousands of hours as a volunteer to Baby’s Milk Fund, an organization originally focused on furnishing homes for single, unwed mothers, and now providing prenatal and pediatric care principally to low-income patients. He also provides financial support to the ROSS Animal Adoption Foundation. Marc and his wife Ann are especially proud of their five children and two grandchildren.

Stacey brings almost 40 years of experience to every client she serves. Those clients include the Morgan Stanley Financial Advisors who entrust their clients’ assets to Trindle Wealth Management.

A native Ohioan, Stacey attended Colorado State University and began her financial services career in Denver at Merrill Lynch. There, she performed a wide variety of functions that ranged from bookkeeping to back-office operations. She is especially proud of the system enhancements she developed to facilitate asset transfer and accelerate money flow in a pre-digital environment.

In 1993, Stacey joined Dean Trindle’s practice at Merrill and moved with him to Morgan Stanley in 2009. She focuses on client service, helping established clients review their accounts, transfer assets and understand how to get the most out of Morgan Stanley’s online client capabilities. She also serves as an important point of contact for Financial Advisors and their Client Service Associates who look to her for help onboarding clients and keeping their accounts running smoothly.

Outside the office, Stacey spends much of her time providing care for her aging father. The experience has given her a greater understanding of the issues faced by retiree clients and their families. She and her husband Bill are also the proud parents of five grown children and the equally proud grandparents of 13 grandchildren.