About

One question, many depths

One question has organized my working life: how do we act well under uncertainty — and what must the world be like for that question to have an answer? I've pursued it as a systems scientist, a mathematician, a quant, a trader, a coach, and a philosopher. Those aren't separate careers. They're the same question met at different depths.

Systems science and uncertainty

I took my Ph.D. in systems science under George Klir, one of the field's founders, working on the quantification of uncertainty — the mathematics of how much a system can be known, and what necessarily stays hidden. That training is the root of everything since. It gave me a formal way to ask the question I'd spend the rest of my life answering in the world: what does a measurement actually tell you, and what does it leave out?

Markets

I took the theory to the hardest test I could find — the markets, where the record is lossy, the stakes are immediate, and you have to act before the picture is complete. Like many people with a theory, I took it to the market and the market nearly took everything back. That humbling taught me the difference between the theory of risk and the reality of risk.

What followed was two decades of practice: financial technology, beginning with TradeStops, that has helped tens of thousands of self-directed investors manage billions of dollars; a coaching program on how real people can face risk without either denial or panic; and, more recently, rigorous quantitative research — institutional-grade backtesting, connected to the cycles analysis tooling, testing honestly what does and doesn't hold. RiskSmith grew out of this work: helping investors act with discipline instead of emotion. People in the markets world came to call me "the Doctor of Uncertainty." At the time it meant risk management. I've since come to understand what the uncertainty actually is — the gap between the lossy record and the structure it points to — and the name means more to me now than it did then.

None of this is a promise of prediction. I don't sell signals or certainty. The whole point is the opposite: to face what's hidden and do the work anyway.

Cycles

Markets kept pointing past themselves. The recurring structures I saw in prices belong to a much older question — whether nature's rhythms are real, measurable, and meaningful. That question has an institution: the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, founded in 1941, which I serve as Chairman. The Foundation carries forward the empirical study of cycles across markets, nature, and society — with the statistical discipline the field's early enthusiasts often lacked, and its critics rightly demanded.

Wolfgang Smith

Along the way I found in the mathematician and philosopher Wolfgang Smith the deepest articulation of the question I'd been circling — the relation between what measurement discloses and what it cannot. I didn't only study his work; I served it. I was President of the Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation for two years, I supported the release of the film about his thought,The End of Quantum Reality, and I helped him recover the rights to his own books and bring them back into print in new editions. Carrying that work in the world, at first hand, shaped my own.

Philosophy

Underneath the mathematics and the markets is a philosophical program. My current research argues that the turning geometry behind cycle phenomena — rotation, phase, projection — is also the right lens on measurement itself, classical and quantum. That work connects mathematics, physics, and metaphysics: what measurement can disclose, what it cannot, and why meaning is prior to both. The first public document of the program is Meaning and Measurement — the spine of a book in progress.

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