Richard Piotrowski, CFA
Founder, Managing Director
Equity Trading and Quantitative Strategies

As a veteran of the technology industry and the finance industry, Richard has been a fierce advocate of innovative, analytically deep and thorough work, focused on the fundamental question: "How do we improve this by making it more simple?"

In the early 1980s, stagflation (high unemployment & high inflation) was pervasive in the United States and Canada.  Richard was a member of the Special Studies team at the Bank of Canada that defined monetary policy to crush inflation and set in motion the enormous economic expansion of that period.

He joined Canada's investment banking community in the early 1990s as an analyst following technology companies, and founded the Internet technology practice at two boutique investment banks.  His thorough and innovative approach to company analysis was immediately recognized by the Street as he was voted #1 for Quality of Research and #1 for New Ideas by institutional investors.

Richard has 20+ years of experience building, dissecting, and find tuning models and financial statements.  In the late 1980s, he developed a unique econometric model of the Canadian and US commercial real estate sectors.  The work was fundamental to winning the endorsement of a large University endowment fund to allocate several billion dollars to commercial real estate investments.

As Chief Financial Officer of a Logistics software and hardware company, he raised equity capital from angel investors.  His critical eye for cutting operations costs and balancing working capital commitments ensured that the Company continuously made payroll.

Richard's decades of investing experience had led to the development of an innovative style of investing simply described as using proprietary screens to find deep-value growth companies and overvalued companies that have not yet been recognized by the Street.  The model used public information to develop a forward view of the financial data (such as earnings, revenues and cash flow).  The number of companies identified as undervalued, overvalued or fully valued is a function of a proprietary multiplier which is a function of the yield spread on Government bonds, currencies and the changes in commodity prices.  In other words, as the general context of the market changes, so does the number of companies determined to be undervalued, overvalued or fully valued.

This methodology has worked exceptionally well with momentum names as our multiplier captures the change in the overall market liquidity.

Richard is currently a Board member on the Austin Society of Chartered Financial Analysts, on the audit committee, as well as a leader of the committee for the annual Forecast Dinner and the monthly speaker luncheons.  He is also a founding member of the Texas Society of Chartered Financial Analysts.