Advocacy & Outlook

I am an advocate for the democratic republic model of state governance, free market capitalism (Feeding America's market for food banks proves Ronald Coase's rebuke of Vladimir Lenin's one single factory in The Nature of the Firm), accessible education, and collective narrative infrastructure. I'm saving up for a Chatham House membership for their eLibrary and a Philanthropy.com membership for GrantStation. For risk management, OpenRiskManual.org is useful to reference. For cybersecurity and protecting from identity theft, I advocate for the use of passkeys and authenticator codes for multi-factor authentication (2FA) because phone numbers are not secure. Yubico security keys, Proton Pass & SimpleLogin, Cloaked.com is great, Efani is the most secure cellular plan I've found, I hate credit cards so I use Privacy.com to protect my debit card numbers, and iPostal1 to shield my address from merchants. I ship to Mr. W, but I am considering fluidly using Mx. W to protect the personally identifiable information that is my identity.

Prediction markets try to quantize and inference what the future will be. I believe it's impossible for us to be absolutely confident of what will happen, so we use statistics and probilistic models. Free markets try to democratize the calculation of risk. What the markets think is not always true. New technology brings new risk. Black box artificial intelligence models often produce errors. I encourage using tractable probabilistic models for explainability in all industries. If a mistake is made it needs an explanation not a shrug and excuse. I also encourage the use of compressed sub-quadratic models for efficiency.

Inspired by Renaissance Technologies, I plan to sit for the Series 65 exam, and I have been studying to write quantitative financial algorithms. Inspired by the University of Cambridge Centre for Business Research paper Shareholder Value or Public Purpose? From John Maynard Keynes and Adolf Berle to the Modern Debate, I strive to incorporate and invest in equitable, employee owned, public benefit entities (PBLP/PBLLC/PBCs) with measurable purpose statements and triple bottom line accounting. I condemn vague and abstract purpose statements that do little but argue against the fiduciary duty of executives to shareholders. Thank you Ken Adams for criticizing abstract nouns. I condemn private equity firms that loan-to-own their way to cutting pension. I condemn the abuse of patent offices with unnecessarily complicated patent thickets. I wish for the American adoption of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards for measuring management. I disagree with restrictions on advisers preventing them from factoring in anthropogenic environmental risk and non-shareholding stakeholders.

I personally like the looks of Interactive Brokers for international securities, Charles Schwab for payment-for-order-flow routing, Lightspeed brokerage for co-location, Wedbush Securities clearing and settlement, and Bank of New York for custody. Investors’ Exchange (IEX) and their speed bump is also interesting. OpenSanctions & fuzzy name matching, Plaid (KYC for investors), and Middesk (KYB for investments) are essential. On the matter of securities offerings, I am curious about Reg D for accredited investors to Reg A to SPAC/Form S-1 initial public offering (IPO). Midsize Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)-registered financial auditors like Citrin Cooperman, EisnerAmper, CohnReznick seem to align with my frugality. The Big Four aren’t for everybody.