Limited downside.
Uncapped upside.

I'm a systematic trader and risk manager. I write mainly about systematic trading and quantitative analysis, with occasional commentary on risk management, life, and psychology.

The Work

I lead the commodity risk management function at one of the largest CPG companies in North America, where I get to work alongside some genuinely brilliant people — true experts in trading futures and options.

That professional grounding carries over into how I trade for myself. I've been trading as a hobby for over 20 years, most of it discretionary, with a decade-plus specifically in commodity futures and options. About three years ago I began transitioning my personal book to be fully systematic, and today I run a systematic portfolio spanning stocks, commodities, ETFs, fixed income, and futures.

Why I Write

I write because you cannot truly understand what you cannot teach. Every time I sit down to explain a strategy or a framework, I find the gaps in my own thinking — the assumptions I hadn't actually tested, the logic I'd only half worked through.

In my opinion it matters more now than ever, not less. LLMs make it easy to sound informed without ever doing that work — to get a fluent answer without the friction that actually builds understanding. Writing on Skew Matters is how I keep that friction in my own process.

What Skew Matters Means

Skew Matters is a philosophy. The name comes from a simple idea: the most valuable opportunities in life and investing tend to be positively skewed. A positively skewed outcome is one where your downside is limited but your upside is potentially large. You may take many small losses, failures, or disappointments along the way, but a single large success can more than compensate for them.

In mathematical terms, positive skew creates positive expectancy. In practical terms, it means consistently placing small, intelligent bets on opportunities where the potential reward significantly outweighs the risk. This principle applies far beyond financial markets — it's the same logic underneath a trend-following system and underneath a well-lived life.

Reading books is positively skewed: most will have a modest impact, but one great idea can change the trajectory of your career. Exercise is positively skewed: the benefits compound over decades while the daily cost stays small. Building businesses, developing skills, networking, publishing your work, buying cheap optionality, and running robust trend-following systems are all examples of positively skewed pursuits.

The common thread is simple: repeatedly take small, manageable risks in exchange for the possibility of disproportionately large rewards. Over time, those opportunities compound.

Methodology

Every strategy that appears here runs through a validation harness before it earns a mention, let alone capital. The emphasis is on the checks that catch overfitting:

• Deflated Sharpe Ratio (DSR) — Sharpe adjusted for the number of trials, sample length, and non-normality of returns.
• Probability of Backtest Overfitting (PBO) via combinatorially-symmetric cross-validation (CSCV).
• Regime and subsample splits — full-period metrics are never reported alone.
• Cost and capacity realism — slippage, carry, and turnover modeled before a result counts.

Follow Along

New research and essays go out regularly. Subscribe below to get them by email, or follow along on X at @skewmatters.