Dear investor, do your homework

many years ago, I lost a painful amount on a major European corporation which was part of a basket of equities that a high-priced money manager had assembled for me. The AAA-rated corporation suddenly went bankrupt and it was 10% of my portfolio.

Never again, I said. That was 1999.

And so I began a two decade-long excavation into how to use technology to give my investments an edge, both in growth and capital preservation. My idea was to apply statistics to stock price series (and to fundamentals) in order to extract patterns of predictability. I joined up with a scientist in Cincinnati and a programmer in Singapore (who I had met online) and we got started.

Millions (literally, millions) of lines of codes were written. Hundreds of systems were imagined,