MARKETWISE, INC. (MKTW) Business

Item 1. Business.

We started in 1999 with the simple idea that, if we could publish intelligent, independent, insightful, and in-depth investment research and treat the subscriber the way we would want to be treated, then subscribers would renew their subscriptions and stay with us. That simple idea worked and has guided our decisions ever since.

Today, we are a leading multi-brand platform of subscription businesses that provides premium financial research, software, education, and tools for self-directed investors. We provide our subscribers with the research, education, and tools that they need to navigate the financial markets.

We have evolved significantly since our inception in 1999. Over the years, we have expanded our business into a comprehensive suite of investment research products and solutions. We now produce a diversified product portfolio from a variety of financial research brands such as Stansberry Research, Chaikin Analytics, Brownstone Research, InvestorPlace, and TradeSmith. Our entire investment research product portfolio is 100% digital and

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channel agnostic. We offer our research across a variety of platforms, including desktop, laptop, and mobile devices, including tablets and mobile phones.

As a result of the expansion of the business, we now have over 67 editors and analysts covering a broad spectrum of investments, ranging from commodities to equities, to distressed debt and cryptocurrencies. This diversity of content has allowed our business to succeed and our subscription base to grow through the many economic cycles in our over 25-year history. We have a subscriber base of approximately 374 thousand Paid Subscribers. We define Paid Subscribers as the total number of unique subscribers with at least one paid subscription at the end of a given period.

Our Value Proposition

We empower retail investors with institutional-quality research at a price point that is accessible.

Experienced analysts, with their own unique investment strategies and philosophies, lead our brands. As a result, we do not promote a single, unified view of the markets, but instead we publish a mosaic of opinions, recommendations, and strategies.

This multi-brand approach gives our work far greater breadth, creating more diverse opportunities for our subscribers. Our brands are linked, however, by a continuous commitment to risk management and a contrarian approach to identifying investment opportunities.

Across all our brands, we focus on investments that are unloved, ignored, or unknown. Having an informed perspective in these situations gives our subscribers the best risk-to-reward opportunities.

We recognize that self-directed investors do not typically have the same research budget and resources at their disposal as institutional investors do. So we strive to provide them with institutional quality research at affordable price points. Unlike traditional institutional research, our offerings are significantly less expensive and more accessible. They are designed to be less technical and therefore more easily understood by subscribers who may not be finance professionals. At the same time, our offerings include premium content that is highly actionable.

We believe that if we publish research to help our subscribers succeed in the financial markets, they will progressively become better investors, renew their subscriptions, and become long-term customers. We have proven out this thesis throughout our over 25-year history. We have formed long-standing relationships with our subscribers by providing superior value through our offerings.

We provide a comprehensive suite of research solutions.

Through 9 primary customer facing brands, we currently have 22 free products and 112 paid products. We cover various investment strategies, such as value investing, income, growth, commodities, cryptocurrencies, venture, biotechnology, mutual funds, options, and trading. We find that our subscribers develop personal affinities for specific writers and certain investment styles, and specific brands. When we acquire brands or form joint ventures, which we engage in periodically, we typically maintain the existing brands because we want to avoid disrupting those relationships by interjecting a new company name or persona, since subscribers may not have any prior relationship with us.

We typically publish our research reports on a monthly basis, although some of our products publish more frequently.

We also offer financial software and analytical tools.

We continue to expand our research portfolio with software and analytical tool solutions, which include the Chaikin Power Gauge, TradeStops and the Altimeter. Our software and analytical tool solutions represented 52% of our Billings in 2025. Billings represents amounts invoiced to customers.

Our Chaikin Analytics brand offers a suite of stock research tools and portfolio management services that help investors pick winning stocks and drop losing stocks ahead of market shifts. Our TradeSmith brand provides a full

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suite of portfolio management software tools that enable individual investors to manage their portfolios using algorithms that have been back tested for results and designed to help investors manage their emotions. Our Altimetry brand offers a user-friendly database showing uniform, accounting-based financial summaries for more than 4,000 companies.

We have developed screeners, monitors, portfolio management tools, and a set of proprietary indicators that produce a composite score to rank several thousand publicly traded companies in the United States. Our various digital research platforms integrate our content with public financial data in well-designed user interfaces to provide our users with valuable tools to easily consume our research, keep track of investments, import their portfolios and more.

Our product offerings reinforce each other and produce a strong flywheel effect across our organization. As we launch or add more products, we increase the tools available to our readers and the value we provide to our existing subscribers. This allows us to gather insights and feedback and helps us create new products and solutions.

Our Growth Strategy

We are committed to growing our business by deepening our relationship with existing customers and attracting new subscribers to our platform. We will also pursue strategic growth as opportunities arise. Here’s how we grow our business:

Attract more subscribers. We typically acquire new subscribers through an omni-channel marketing strategy that includes display ads, email, external subscriber lists, and direct mail, as well as television and radio at times. We primarily market in these channels through free-to-paid and direct-to-paid content.

We measure our customer-acquisition performance by a matrix of new customer counts and the cost to acquire customers. The mix of our marketing spend across these channels varies among our primary customer-facing brands and depends on how well individual marketing campaigns succeed, the nature of the product, and the type of offer.

We have invested significant resources into our efforts around consumer marketing, including enterprise-wide customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems, the leveraging of artificial intelligence (“AI”) to analyze this data, and a robust database of customer information.

In all of our marketing efforts, we collect and analyze customer response data by channel and effort, down to the individual advertisement in a marketing campaign. Using this data-driven and time-tested approach, we have developed proprietary practices for customer acquisition that we believe set us apart from other companies.

As we develop our relationship with the customer, we collect information from our subscribers about what products they are purchasing, their customer experience, and any feedback they have on our free and paid products. We use this information to deepen the customer experience and present offers to our subscribers for other products that they are likely to find interesting and useful.

Deepen our relationship with our existing subscribers. In addition to our Paid Subscribers, all of our Active Free Subscribers have access to our extensive library of free and educational content. We define Active Free Subscribers unique subscribers who have subscribed to one of our free investment publications via a valid email address and who have received and/or consumed our content during the quarter, excluding any Paid Subscribers who also have free subscriptions. As our subscribers learn and gain confidence as investors, they understand the need to deploy diverse investment strategies for different market conditions and they explore our broad and diverse product offerings. They gain an understanding of the high quality of research that we strive to provide, and they tend to

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purchase additional research and software products. These deep relationships are evident in the fact that over 50% of our 2025 Billings are attributable to subscribers who have been with us for more than 4 years.

Our free subscription products serve as a significant source of new Paid Subscribers.

We also offer members-only investing conferences where subscribers interact with our editors and analysts and can network with each other. We have a strong track record of cultivating these relationships with our subscribers, and we intend to continue that going forward.

Launch new products and target new markets. Over our greater than 25-year history, we have developed a breadth of products and services that are designed to educate, empower, and entertain our subscribers and provide them with actionable investment ideas.

We offer a wide array of paid subscription products, ranging from lower priced products (e.g., subscriptions that cost $100 annually) to more expensive products (e.g., subscriptions that can cost up to $5,000 annually). The length of our subscriptions can vary from one year to what we refer to as “membership subscriptions,” where subscribers pay upfront for access to our specific products, and then only pay an annual maintenance fee ranging from $49 to $500 per year.

We have also developed various software applications that provide customers with algorithmic tools to search for trading ideas and manage portfolio risk. We will continue to enhance our value proposition and create additional selling opportunities through an expanded product portfolio.

Selectively pursue strategic growth. Over the past several years, we have developed several joint ventures and executed strategic acquisitions to accelerate our growth, as well as increase the value of our offerings to our subscribers.

We have a strong track record of driving growth and delivering value through the successful integration of acquisitions and joint ventures. We believe our large subscriber base, easy scalability, marketing expertise, technology-based platform, and integration capabilities provide opportunities for us to drive value-added growth through acquisitions.

We have also made key investments across our platform to create a repeatable, low-cost, and scalable business model. We have invested in business functions from marketing to technology which allow us to scale rapidly.

We plan to continue investing in cutting-edge AI and advanced analytics-driven marketing tools to further optimize our marketing channels.

Competition

The market for investment research and financial information software is evolving and is highly fragmented. As the markets in which we operate continue to mature and new technologies and competitors enter those markets, we expect competition to intensify. Our competitor categories include:

•free online financial news aggregators or customer content platforms, like Yahoo! Finance and Seeking Alpha;

•traditional financial news publishers, like the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and Barron’s;

•consumer-focused online subscription businesses, such as The Motley Fool;

•institutional financial software providers, such as Bloomberg, FactSet, and IHS Markit;

•low-cost, “mom and pop” newsletter subscription services, and

•online investing tools, such as Atom Finance and Stocktwits.

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For additional information regarding the competitive environment in which we operate, see Item 1A. Risk Factors —“We face significant competition. Many of our competitors and potential competitors have larger customer bases, more established brand recognition, and greater financial, marketing, technological, and personnel resources than we do, which could put us at a competitive disadvantage. Additionally, some of our competitors and potential competitors are better capitalized than we are and are able to obtain capital more easily, which could put us at a competitive disadvantage.”

Our Technology

We use technology to run our business efficiently and to better serve our customers. Our technology combines three cloud-based systems: software-as-a-service (“SaaS”); platform-as-a-service (“PaaS”); and infrastructure-as-a-service (“IaaS”).

While we have changed providers in the past and may do so in the future, we currently use top-tier, industry leading service providers for our CRM and marketing, email delivery, subscription billing, data warehouse, and for our data center.

Our infrastructure is highly scalable and allows us to serve all of our subscribers simultaneously and consistently. Our technology architecture is scalable based on overall traffic and capacity. As a result, we do not believe that growth in the number of subscribers hinders or slows down our platform.

We also employ data redundancy solutions on the cloud to reduce the possibility that our customer data will be lost and to ensure that our platform will not experience material downtime. We apply industry-standard data security measures to protect against potential vulnerabilities in our technology.

We have invested heavily in providing a reliable and secure global platform and infrastructure. Our investments in technology, including engineers, online security, customer privacy, reliable infrastructure, and data science capabilities, enable us to efficiently innovate and deliver solutions to our customers. Our cloud platform allows our developers to build and deploy in a lean and agile fashion with a focus on quality and solution adoption.

We continue to build out our AI tools and predictive analytics capacity through identification of additional business cases and additional data features.

Our data center is cloud-based, and through this platform we have been able to integrate the various SaaS and PaaS applications within our technology ecosystem and ensure that we have high availability and redundancy with business continuity in mind in an auto-scaling architecture.

Human Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2025, we had 451 total employees across all of our businesses, substantially all of which are full-time. Our employees work from our U.S. offices or remote locations. None of our employees are represented by a labor organization or are party to any collective bargaining arrangement.

We seek to attract, engage, and retain top talent through competitive compensation and benefit programs, and by fostering a culture of high performance, creativity and idea exchange as well as inviting diverse perspectives that will enable our employees to thrive and be successful.

Our compensation programs include both fixed and variable components, an incentive award plan providing for equity grants, and an employee stock purchase plan, all of which we believe incentivize our employees to perform at high levels, helps them establish long-term financial security, and encourages them to remain with us.

Our benefits package includes health and welfare plans that provide medical, dental, and vision coverage, health savings accounts, medical and dependent care flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability insurance, 401(k) savings plan with a company match, paid time off and other assistance, fitness and wellness programs.

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Intellectual Property

We rely on a combination of trademarks and copyrights to protect our intellectual property. We have registered certain of our trademarks and service marks in the United States with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in Canada and China, and have registered copyrights on certain publications. In addition, we have registered our domain names, including MarketWise.com, with MarkMonitor. We believe the names and marks associated with our brands are of significant value and are important to our business. Accordingly, as a general policy, we monitor the use of our marks and vigorously oppose any unauthorized use of the marks. We do not hold any patents.

We seek to control access to and distribution of our proprietary information. We enter into confidentiality, nondisclosure, and non-interference agreements with our employees, consultants, customers, and vendors that generally provide that any confidential or proprietary information developed by us or on our behalf be kept confidential, and we limit access to our confidential and proprietary information. In the normal course of business, we provide our intellectual property to third parties through licensing or restricted use agreements. In addition, our internal policies seek to protect our intellectual property against misappropriation, infringement, and unfair competition. We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost effective.

Available Information

Our website address is MarketWise.com. The information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website is deemed not to be incorporated in this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to be part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K, as well as any amendments to those reports, are available free of charge through our website as soon as reasonably practicable after we file them with, or furnish them to, the SEC. The SEC maintains a website at www.sec.gov that contains reports, proxy statements, and other information regarding SEC registrants, including MarketWise, Inc.