About

As an individual investor I’ve been active in options and stocks for over 25 years. After getting mauled in the 2000 tech crash, I resolved to pay a lot more attention to  macroeconomic forces and was able to avoid the worst of the 2008/2009 crash.  My interests include volatility as an asset class, macroeconomic forecasting, investor psychology, tax efficient investing,  and risk management strategies.  My investment activities include trading commodity and index ETFs, VIX index related ETNs and their associated options, and dividend capture combinations.

My goal is relatively modest returns at appropriate risk while avoiding “buy and hold” strategies—which  I think are fundamentally flawed.

A couple things I believe:

• The past does not predict the future  (see Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness“)
  • This invalidates much technical analysis—although I think the psychology of stock movements is very important.
• Past behavior of assets relative to each other (e.g., bonds vs stocks) does not guarantee future behavior
• Markets fall a lot faster than they go up, typically at least 2X”Buy and hold” ensures that you will experience the worst days as well as the best days of the market
• Investing in individual stocks carries many more unknowns than aggregates ike index ETFs (e.g., greatly reduced the impacts of earnings surprises, analyst’s ratings)

I’m interested in consulting engagements.  My areas of expertise include:

• Investment analysis and modeling
  -  Analyzing/backtesting financial products
  -  Manipulating large data sets
  -  Monte-Carlo simulations
  -  Volatility as an asset class
  .
• Business analysis and modeling
  -  Profit and loss, NPV
  -  Resource planning, budgeting
  .
• Technology analysis, forecasting, testing
  -  Software, finance, electronics
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• Synthesizing concise business presentations with effective graphics
  -  Product development, marketing,
  …finance, manufacturing