CML News Contributors

Ophir Gottlieb

Ophir Gottlieb is the co-founder, CEO and Editor in Chief of Capital Market Laboratories (CML). His real Twitter account is @ophirgottlieb (please beware of several fakes). He was rated the 12th best finance follow on Twitter in January 2015 by Evan Carmichael.

Mr. Gottlieb writes financial news for CML and also as a contributor to Yahoo! Finance, CNN Money, MSN Money, and before then for Marketwatch, Business Insider, TheStreet and Real Money. He has become a staple in financial TV, often times seen on the Business News Network (Recent BNN) and CBC (Recent CBC Appearance).

CML's news can also be founded on Google News and Apple News as well as on Thomson First Call for insititutional investors.

Mr. Gottlieb's experience includes working as an option market maker on the NYSE ARCA exchange floor (CBOE remotely), as Managing Director of Client Services and Algorithmic Trading for Livevol, Inc, and as the Managing Director and Product Manager of Quantitative Research for GMI (now MSCI).

Ophir Gottlieb is inventor of the Forensic Alpha Model (FAM) and a co-inventor of Accounting and Governance Risk Model, both purchased by MSCI. FAM has been a celebrated achievement in artificial intelligence and quantitative finance that was introduced to world by the Rotman International Journal upon its completion. A description of FAM has been published on SSRN.

While the commercial FAM model is now owned by MSCI, the core methodological approach was endorsed by the head of artificial intelligence for the state of Germany as a novel and extraordinary application of advanced machine learning and quantitative finance. FAM and AGR are used by asset managers worldwide with over $1 trillion of assets under management. The FAM model has made Mr. Gottlieb one of the most recognized names in all of quantitative finance.

Mr Gottlieb's mathematics, measure theory and machine learning background stems from his graduate work at Stanford University and his time as an option market maker on the NYSE and CBOE exchange floors. He has been cited by various financial media including Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall St. Journal, Dow Jones Newswire and through re-publications in Barron's, Forbes, SF Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald and is often seen on financial television.

James A. Kaplan

For the past 20 years, James Kaplan's research interests and entrepreneurial ventures have focused on innovations designed to improve the predictive and explanatory power of classical finance theories and portfolio management philosophies. Before he co-founded CML, Mr. Kaplan as Vice Chairman and Chief Executive of GMI Ratings (now part of MSCI). In this role, Mr. Kaplan developed novel risk modeling methodologies to help capital market participants mitigate the impact of what he has dubbed "routine anomalies". The term refers to high-impact events stemming from variables typically overlooked in classical economic theories.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Kaplan has advanced ground breaking applications of quantitative techniques and technology-driven solutions for equity and fixed-income portfolio analytics. In 1979, he founded Capital Management Sciences (CMS) and established the firm as the world's top purveyor of fixed income portfolio analytics. During his tenure, the firm introduced CMS BondEdge, the chief independent source of research and valuation tools for the global bond market.

Following the sale of CMS to Interactive Data Corporation, Mr. Kaplan was a founding director of MarketWatch, a pioneer in using the Internet to deliver real-time news and data. In the wake of the notorious corporate scandals after 2000, he founded Audit Integrity, one of the three firms that merged to form GMI Ratings.

Mr. Kaplan received his BA from the University of Colorado and an MBA from California State University. Mr. Kaplan is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Jason Hitchings

Jason Hitchings has 14 years of experience in financial technology that he brings to his writing. He has diverse background in software engineering, product development, data visualizations as well as numerical analysis and real-time algorithmic option pricing.

He was the lead developer and product manager that led to one of the first ever SQL databases that updated asset prices in real-time; an accomplishment at the time that was considered by many in the industry to be impossible but is now common place in all of the exchanges and major banks in the world.

Jason’s experience includes Head of Product at data visualization firm, Quid, the co-founder and lead engineer of financial analytics firm and broker-dealer, Livevol, Inc.

Jason has also worked as the lead software engineer on Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter Autonomic Logistics team.

Jason holds a computer science degree from University of Colorado, Boulder.

Thomas White

Tom White is a veteran of the finance world.

As Director of Quantitative Research for Audit Integrity (now part of MSCI) he applied predictive analytic techniques to model accounting fraud and securities class action litigation. Mr. White led the Analytic Science team at KUITY in groundbreaking work applying 'Big Data' techniques to the field of philanthropy, ultimately resulting in the creation and spinoff of Posiba, Inc. As a consultant at First USA Bank, Mr. White's team was one of the earliest adopters of analytics, using predictive models to optimize marketing efforts, increasing profits from 3rd party products by over 250% in just 24 months.

Mr. White received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia and a Certification in Data Mining from the University of California, San Diego.