Combined Skills
Freelancing + Editing + Journalism + Proofreading + Scripts + Copywriting + Research + Literature Reviews + Custom Digital Artwork + Online Retailing + Websites + SEO + Landing Pages + Chatbots + Event Coordination + PHP Coding + Microsoft Office + Interpersonal Communication + Desktop Publishing + Current Position

Experienced and Reliable

These 3 steps ensure successful outcomes, both for your project and our relationship. Following step 3, you'll gain access to a secure portal for easier collaboration.

Combined Skills
Education + Psychology + Environmental Psychology + Literature Reviews + Research + Journalism + Writing + Surveys + Investment + Organizational Analysis

I was first convinced of anthropogenic climate change in 1987 by a biochemist at the University of Alberta. Since then, I have pondered what I would need to understand to make a positive contribution.

I met Dr. Robert Gifford one afternoon in February 2014 during his regular office hours. He would guide my studies for the next 3 years.

Dr. Gifford was chair of the psychology department, and editor of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. He had developed the Human Dimensions of Climate Change (HDCC) program a few years prior at the Dean's request.

I wanted to know why some people deny climate change while others are willing to take action, but the answers are not limited to a single field. HDCC featured speakers from multiple academic disciplines, so Dr. Gifford advised me to start there.

During the 2014 fall semester, while I was taking HDCC 200, the UVic chapter of Divest Canada occupied the office of the University Senate to protest the university endowment fund having investments in fossil fuels.

The protesters got nowhere. The Senate dug in their heels. One was focused on demands while disregarding economics and the other was focused on economics while demanding civility.

I decided to write an op-ed for the Martlet criticizing them both for their unreasonableness. It looked at the fund's portfolio and drew attention to green investments that had yielded greater returns than the disputed companies.

In November, HDCC 200 students were organized into groups of 5 or 6 to research and give presentations to the rest of the class. My group chose the divest movement as our topic. I suggested we use a LoNGPEST framework to organize our presentation. The objective was to explain why the Divest Club failed to sway the Senate.

We looked at the successes and failures of several divest organizations around the world, and observed that shaming tactics largely fail to get people and organizations to divest. Rather, the movement was more successful when it focused on the situational concerns of investors.

Based on my previous education and grades in HDCC 200, the head of the program invited me to advance straight to HDCC 400. It had the densest science components and the most reading. The next sitting was in the fall of 2015.

In the meantime, I took an individually supervised course from Dr. Gifford. He wanted me to learn how to develop a testable hypothesis, conduct surveys with the approval of the ethics committee, and use SPSS to interpret data. I was wrong about my hypothesis, but I did survey 120 people and identify a cognitive disconnection between economic and environmental concerns.

After I completed HDCC 400 in the fall of 2015, I took a second individually supervised course from Dr. Gifford. The final project was about enabling pro-environmental volition and involved an extensive literature review.

In the summer of 2016, Dr. Gifford invited me to take his graduate seminar in the fall. He was an excellent mentor. The invitation was based on his confidence in my ability to do the work. My final grade in Environmental Psychology 531 was an A.

At the start of 2017, the money I set aside for school was running out. I explained my situation to Dr. Gifford, and he left the door open for me to come back.

Combined Skills
Research + Writing + Presentation + Governance + Education + Literature Reviews + Political Science + Economics + History

In the summer of 1999, the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Training and Technology was located in the historic St. Anne's Academy, in beautiful downtown Victoria. I worked there for 8 months as a co-op student from Camosun College.

As a Researcher II, my assignment was to write 80 pages on the value of post-secondary education by the end of December 1999. I would present my final report to the Director of Colleges and Program Planning.

I completed an extensive literature review of the costs and benefits post-secondary education brings to the economy, public and personal health, crime rates, urban environments, earnings, happiness, birth rates, marital success, literacy, numeracy, and provincial governance.

The final document was 78 pages, not counting appendices. I presented my findings on December 7, 1998 in a meeting room on the 3rd floor of St Anne's Academy.

I returned to Camosun in September to finish the business program and pursue my dream of starting a business.

Combined Skills
Finance + Securities + Investment + Education + Blogging + Research + Psychology + Economics

My education in securities began in 1992, while I was working in Prince George and saving for the final year of my undergraduate degree.

That spring, I read The Wealthy Barber. Then I went to Montreal Trust in Prince George BC and bought units in a Total Return Fund. The capital gains were enough for me to avoid any new debt in my final year at the University of Alberta.

In 2001, I was doing freelance tech support. One of my clients was the number one grossing financial planner with Investor's Group, Susan Nielsen.

Susan had a mentor's mindset. After I developed a computer networking solution for her office, I wrote a manual for the upgrade and we sold it to the company.

Susan encouraged my interests and suggested I take the Canadian Investment Funds Course. I passed the IFIC exam on my first attempt in April 2002.

In 2006, I bought the complete set of textbooks for the Canadian Securities Course and spent the summer reading them.

That fall, I started a blog on financial psychology with the expressed goal of publishing 500 words on the topic every Friday for 52 consecutive weeks. For one year, I read books and articles daily, and spent two evenings a week researching and writing the blog.

Every blog post addressed a cognitive bias or a common mistake among amateur investors. The books I read included Fooled by Randomness, The Intelligent Investor, and The Tao of Warren Buffett.

In 2012, I did a freelance php coding contract for Cathy Sweeney, a retired Executive Financial Advisor who lead a team at Morgan Stanley for 26 years in Los Angeles.

When I met Cathy, I was reading about complexity theory. Like Susan, she had a mentor's mentality. Over the next 2 years, we actively discussed how complexity theory applied to investing. Cathy not only encouraged me to read several books, such as The Black Swan, and Irrational Exuberance, she also taught me how to golf.

In November of 2013, after dozens of tests, conversations, and revisions, we produced the output that satisfied Cathy's research objectives. I wrote up a manual which described the methods used to obtain our results, and Cathy sold it to a firm owned by a group of her former colleagues in February 2014.

Investment Philosophy (This is not advice!)
Since 2008, I have mainly invested in water-related funds and equities such as this ETF on the grounds that as the world's population urbanizes and agricultural production faces increasing strain from climate change, the demand for plumbing, desalination, and irrigation will increase significantly.

The profits from Cathy's sale enabled me to ease back on freelancing and return to academia. I registered at the University of Victoria and began taking classes on the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in September 2014.

Combined Skills
Websites + PHP Coding + APIs + RSS Feeds + MySQL Databases + Research + Journalism + Environmental Psychology

The online space is filled with algorithmic echo chambers.

While I was studying Environmental Psychology at the University of Victoria, I saw how difficult it is to get a complete picture of environmental resilience using social media and search engines. So in 2018, I created ontheground.net.

The mission is to deliver continuously updated single page briefs filled with quality content, on topics connected to environmental resilience.

On the ground reporting is about covering the people who are closest to events. Every brief is a curated web of informative links and videos, seeded by community television stations and newspapers.

Briefs are designed to show the links between human well-being and an aspect of environmental resilience. The rate articles come out is a loose indicator of interest in the news on a particular topic. Take the brief on food security, for example. The issue is global in scope, but the forefront is your grocery basket. Its publication rate is reported at the top of the page.

Ontheground follows over 200 local newspapers from more than 150 communities across Canada. To create a brief, it cross-references the latest news coverage in Canada with recent papers published in over 1800 peer-reviewed journals worldwide.

The research for this project began with an initial list of 140 topics directly connected to the ability to bounce back from environmental disasters, which I extracted from 1549 peer-reviewed papers via an API provided by JSTOR using software that I wrote.

The list has since expanded to over 1200 topics, most of which I added manually as I learned about environmental resilience by using the site.

I designed the branding using photoshop and built the website from scratch in TextPad. The backend is written in PHP, uses a MySQL database, and checks hundreds of RSS feeds daily for relevant news, videos, podcasts, jobs, and published peer-reviewed research.

Ontheground also posts top-interest articles on Facebook daily.

Combined Skills
Cryptocurrrency + Algorithms + APIs + PHP Coding + Trading + Finance + Investment + Research + Websites

In 2017, I took on the challenge of designing an algortihmic trading system for cryptocurrencies, taking an experimental approach and working as the sole researcher and developer. I wanted to apply my knowledge of APIs, complexity theory, and finance to see if I could build a profitable trading bot from scratch.

I began by crafting several algorithms that tested ideas taken from technical trading, with the goal of developing one that independently makes trading decisions. Eventually I settled on using a combination of technical jargon and real-time headlines using a unique approach to sentiment analysis. After weeding out unproductive ideas that are based on fallacies and cognitive biases (i.e. the gamblers fallacy, hindsight bias, as so forth), I spotted a correlation between terms used in headline and price changes over a 24-hour period.

On June 23, 2019, I initialized version 6 and have continuously refined and evolved it ever since. So far, it has implemented over 225 incremental improvements and identified more than 80 analysts and influencers whose headlines tend to correlate with price changes.

Throughout this experiment, every trade has been logged in the ledger, which is published on the website. This comprehensive record not only helps me track the optimization process but also provides transparency and accountability. It allows me to monitor the progress and make data-driven adjustments whenever necessary.

The heart of the experiment lies in the bottom-line results. By continuously comparing real prices with the information provided by qualified sources, I have fine-tuned the algorithm to more effectively manage risk and make better trading decisions over time. My research and coding efforts have enabled the algorithm to dynamically refine itself, leading to greater gains and smaller losses.

From the very beginning, my primary focus was to develop an algorithm that could select consistently profitable trading strategies. It makes a single trading decision each day. By analyzing the sentiment and relevance of analyst-written headlines, my algorithm autonomously adapts to market conditions, ensuring it remains responsive and effective.

In 2020, based on information gathered from the experiment, I designed a simple game that helps users learn the basics of sentiment trading for free. Using the game, I was able to ascertain flaws in my software and make significant improvements both to how it manages risk and how it interprets the language used by analysts in headlines.

So far, the results show that most analysts and influencers are correct less than half the time. However, some are significantly more accurate, and my software identifies them. It has tested hundreds of analysts, and today it makes decisions based on headlines written by the ones who most consistently use predictive language accurately over time.

Ultimately, version 6 autonomously makes trading decisions based on sentiment analysis. It appears to be able to spot and profit from trends but the experiment is ongoing and there is more to learn. Through meticulous coding and continuous refinement, it has evolved significantly and it will continue to improve. The comprehensive record-keeping and data-driven approach ensure transparency and drive improvements in the system's bottom-line performance.