This past week I chatted with a scientist who is using Composer to create and invest in systematic investment strategies. What do folks think about rules-based investing?

Speaking with folks about the blog in recent weeks, I’ve heard that personal stories have been some of the most impactful. My conversations with Kris and Pietros helped bring Composer to life. Writing 101, I know. But with investing, it’s not so straightforward.

The investment community isn’t good at sharing. Investors desperately try to maintain their edge by keeping their best ideas and algorithms secret. The thought of alpha decay and being front-run keeps portfolio managers up at night.

However, communities have sprung up for retail investors. Twitter (Fintwit), Commonstock, and Reddit have vibrant discussions about markets and strategies. Perhaps retail investors are more willing to share their perspective because they aren’t trading billions of dollars and don’t have their returns meticulously compared to benchmarks.

Retail investors are trying to fund retirement, put kids through school, and achieve financial independence, and a community sharing ideas, lessons learned, and empathy can be a helpful resource. This is probably why Bogleheads, the online forum of Jack Bogle disciples, has lasted so long.

I recently saw this picture on Twitter (h/t @agustinlebron3), and I shared it with the Composer team with the caption “Composer pushes retail investors towards the efficient frontier.”

The goal for retail investors isn’t necessarily to beat the market but instead to build portfolios that meet each individual's unique objectives and risk tolerance. In other words, the goal is to get closer to this efficient frontier of investing.

To that end, I think we can learn a lot from each other, and I am bullish on the investment community. I don’t mean encouraging each other to put our life savings into an options trade on Robinhood, but having conversations about portfolio construction and asset classes I’m all for.

In the Lab

This past week, I sat down with a Composer power user who is constantly in the Composer lab, building and testing symphonies. Ram Samudrala is a professor whose research focuses on computational biology, genomics, and proteomics. Impressive, right? Save some science for the other professors.

By now, you know the drill on these conversations. Ram's opinions and conclusions are his own, and should not be considered as investment advice. Investing involves the risk of loss, including principal and returns are not guaranteed. This writing is an uncompensated testimonial from a current Beta user of Composer.

Ram talks at ~1,000 words per minute, but I leaned closer and closer to Zoom to avoid missing anything. He has boundless energy and an incredibly sharp mind.

A wily veteran, Ram has been investing for over 22 years, navigating the Dotcom Bubble and the Global Financial Crisis. He’s the middle reliever who has played in the post-season and been 30 games under .500.

In addition, Ram is a student of investing. He became interested in algorithmic trading and taught himself to code so he could experiment with new strategies.

Where does Composer come into the story? Scrolling through Reddit one day, Ram saw the Composer allocation chart and was hooked.

I mean, it is beautiful.

From Ram on his investing journey and Composer:

“My interest in the stock market stems from the fact that it's a complex system, and that's what I've spent my career modeling, complex (biological) systems. I see a lot of parallels between market behavior and biological systems in terms of the dynamics and complexity. It's a bit of problem-solving with game theory that makes it fun, and of course, Composer makes some parts of that easy.”