Meet Efrem Hoffman — he is the “Visionary” behind the Running Alpha Story.

Efrem’s insights are rooted in the philosophy that not all things in the world can be rendered with immediate visibility. This is especially relevant to human-driven financial enterprise. His passion is focused on waking up our capacity to see more, and reveal the dynamics of the whole manifesting in the system parts. Only then can we start to comprehend the big picture and make informed decisions that can deliberately paint the canvas. Efrem hopes to play an inspirational role in helping investors and business executives have pain-free experiences on their journey toward better decision-making. His vision is to see RunningAlpha.com as a leading part of a story for rethinking the way mankind can collaborate with nature, to better exploit uncertainty, and compensate for the human condition and machine biases that get in our way of both perceiving world events in high-definition and making bold decisions with attention to detail.

Applying this philosophy to his daily life, Efrem is able to identify hidden Support and Resistance Boundaries for all major markets for impressive results when investors overlay these levels with their own trading tools. When combined with the critical times identified on his proprietary Time Maps of Future Sentiment Jet-Stream Behavior, investor’s are expected to discover a unique edge they never had before in their trading experience!

To make this experience seamless, Efrem did all the heavy-lifting by embedding this Time-Relevant Decision-Making into Running Alpha’s core Heat-Map Display of Alpha-Ideas.

To best protect yourself and thrive in today’s markets of peak uncertainty, take a “walk into the future” with Efrem, and join him on his journey for opening new avenues of investing clarity and insights that are totally different from anything you will find in the global trading research and educational arena!

Efrem Hoffman is the CEO, Founding Architect, and Thought-Leader of RunningAlpha.com Investments Inc., an independent client-focused Canadian Innovation Think-Tank, headquarted in Toronto; employing patented and proprietary insights at the intersection of physics and finance to exploit market uncertainty for competitive advantage; namely:

(i) navigating around fast approaching market threats; and

(ii) hedging-for-a-profit from predictable surprises in global financial, commodity, and foreign exchange markets; surprises which on-balance are otherwise inappropriately misclassified as Black Swan Events — unexpected high-impact tail-risk outliers — by even some of today’s most advanced strategy frameworks.

To observe trend formation before it gets manifested as price transactions, Running Alpha’s Research Framework focuses on observing the physics of market action and portfolio risk factors on a more fundamental scale, namely one that does not confuse the observation and structure of transaction volume behavior and volatility on a given time frame with market agents that created them.

Efrem specializes in developing unique tools for exploiting these overlooked strategic risk factors to enhance the visibility of critical “risk-on” / “risk-off” windows, where markets have high potential for turnaround events; and then navigating around value traps to see emerging opportunities that the crowd cannot see. By embedding these tools in the RunningAlpha.com Platform, we offer a significant improvement to the prior art for revealing time-relevant insights of sentiment perception trends on a human and global scale.

Focusing on identifying Super-Anomalies and Monetizing Hidden Value in Real-Time from large scale financial and social data-sets, Efrem utilizes Advanced Visualization Technologies and Smart-Data Analytic Solutions, he developed out of his Undergraduate Engineering Thesis at the University of Manitoba. From this work, he was not only: (i) recognized by the chief scientist at Canada’s Prairie Atmospheric Environment Service for making valuable contributions to applying machine intelligence for improving the science of forecasting tornado & aviation weather hazards; and (ii) granted multiple U.S. Patents with Big-Data Predictive Solutions that quantify extreme turbulence and uncertainty in financial, social, and atmospheric data sets; but also his Patent Publications have been short-listed for inclusion among thousands of patents in BrainDex’s expansive CD knowledge source of the “215+ Most Fascinating Weather Radar [Inventions].”

His research has been cited on over 68 occasions on the Patent Documents of Fortune 500 Companies and preeminent scientific think tanks, as well as referenced as a unique tool for converting market uncertainty into actionable intelligence by a prominent pioneer of modern behavioral finance at a Berlin Conference in 2010.

Efrem actively shares his insights on Strategy Development and the Future States of Markets, which includes: (i) frequent trend-pieces, published to his 7960+ LinkedIn Followers, and accessible by over 20 Million Industry Professionals in his Linked Network; (ii) invited appearances on: (a) TradingPub webinars; (b) panel discussions at Toronto’s Hedge Fund Hotel, and Toronto Charts Day — a live Bloomberg Event moderated by David Scanlan, Bloomberg’s Managing News Bureau Editor of Canada; (c) Dow Jones Newswires article on Portfolio Stress-Testing by WSJ-Dow Jones Reporter & Columnist, Evelyn Juan; and (d) several feature articles in TradersWorld Magazine & On-Line Presentations at TradersWorld Expo, including contributing author to a TradersWorld #1 Best-Selling Amazon Kindle Book — “Learning the Secrets of Successful Investing” — edited by Larry Jacobs in the category of Investing & Commodities.

In the great words of William Gibson, and adapted from Alvin Toffler’s 1982 edition of Future Shock, it has been said that “The Future is already Here, Just Unevenly Distributed.” These words have particular relevance in today’s financial and technology driven economy. The one statistic that embraces this truth also serves as Efrem’s inspiration for creating Running Alpha, namely that there is less equitable wealth distribution in the world today [ less wealth spread out evenly across developing and emerging countries ] than there was before modern information technology and financial engineering practices opened access to global trade and free markets. We need to start leveling the playing field; and that starts here with accessing better intelligence, so that you can begin making 360 degree decisions; putting you on top of the playing field with the likes of institutional investors, expert networks, and market influencers.

If there is just one thing Efrem has discovered — hitting home hard through his experiences and those of countless others — that gets in the way of successful investing and trading strategy implementation for the novice and expert alike, is the lack of organizing your precious time around putting together a focused basket of today’s highest-impact opportunities in tomorrow’s most relevant industries; and then, as the legendary investor, Gerald M. Loeb reminds us, from his words in “The Battle for Investment Survival,” never keep your eyes off the basket.

Successful Investing is not just about Finding the Next Great Idea; it’s about:
Looking For a Place Where Your Best Trading Concepts and Insights Can Spring To Life;
Enabling You To Make Entry, Exit, and Trade Management Decisions with Ice in Your Veins.

Out of the need for helping the Founder address these challenges and embrace this trusted wisdom,

Running Alpha’s Idea Grid  was born:

A simple, low maintenance, all-in-one mobile-responsive heat map display for the busy executive on the go; designed for visually exploring, prioritizing, and tracking today’s freshest pipe-line of actionable opportunities, all while raising your capital and strategy efficiency, through assisting you at quickly navigating around value traps in search of best expressing your favorite investable ideas.

Although putting all your eggs in one basket may sound risky, the sheer size and range of high-conviction opportunities to choose from on the Grid  gives you the much needed flexibility and peace of mind for customizing and adjusting the size of your basket; breaking you free of capacity constraints and assisting you at accommodating changing volatility conditions.

Efrem is now mobilizing his vision for making the benefits of emerging data science technologies accessible to the everyday investor, for establishing RunningAlpha.com as the premier on-line destination for alpha-idea generation; designed for shock-proofing your portfolio strategy from market noise — while keeping you focused on the right side of key support & resistance levels.

That means eliminating your blind-spots, and making it a snap for converting your pain-points into opportunity; thereby, keeping your wallet closer to your hip and on a competitive playing field with institutional traders.

Tapping into this collective intelligence, Efrem is passionate about rigorously and routinely stress-testing his research framework in the midst of financial hurricanes in equity, commodity, and currency markets; successfully warning investors of the demise of WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, GM, among others, before any signs of trouble emerged. On-balance, a review of the much more mixed market settings, scrolling back as far as 400 years across world capital markets, shows similar predictive intelligence.

With uncanny accuracy and specificity, his market calls were also used to help financial traders and investors successfully prepare ahead of the Dot.Com Bust, 2005-07 USA Housing Crash, and the great recession of 2008-09, as well as the subsequent re-acceleration of growth in 2013, that continues to fuel 2015’s USA-focused market rally and global leadership.

Most notable among his Time Mapping Precasts of Wild Sentiment Jet-Stream Behavior, was the Flash Crash of May 2006; telegraphing in magnitude over two months in advance, and striking inside the exact hourly timing window of the anticipated peak tail-risk threat.

One research group inside Running Alpha, known as the Big-Data and Human-Machine Decision Sciences Network, is tasked with the challenge of mathematically sniffing out digital records of market data to look for deep structure that explain the HOW and the WHY of the market’s human social wiring, and specifically quantifying how and when traders — both human and machine — with different market perceptions and time horizons are plugging into the global grid of fear and greed.

Efrem calls this new analytics philosophy, ‘Bottom-Down Intelligence’ – first drilling down to the very first and smallest scale transaction of an individual security, and then digging deeper into:

(i) the underlying motivations and market ecology that are driving trading decisions; and

(ii) the physics of crowd-sourcing multi-speed investor interactions ( Crowd-Physics 2.0 ), that are shaping collective perceptions and interfering with observation measurement of market rhythms, across wide-ranging groups of market securities.

Going beyond conventional behavioral finance strategy that treats emotional biases as the key alpha-generating inefficiencies, Bottom-Down Analytics now makes it possible to unlock a much more fundamental and root source of Alpha, namely: exploiting social intelligence via analyzing trader ecology — knowledge of subtle self-ordered arrangements and relative differences and similarities in the sentiment measurement biases perceived by market observers.

All of us have known traders who become so locked in their views that they stop seeing and responding to what markets are actually doing. Although this may masquerade as “conviction,” it is actually socially unintelligent — not unlike harping on a topic in a conversation and alienating listeners.

Going back to basics — Research shows that we frequently make reference to market sentiment and changes in market character, much as we would speak of another person.

Running Alpha’s Time Maps of the Forward Sentiment Jet-Stream is all about enhancing your Social Trading IQ and leveraging your skills at reading and responding to actions and emotions from the eyes of your competitors; and knowing how to combine this mash-up of market insight for shining a light on the best ideas from among the background noise of what individuals and players around the table think: what they fear, want, value and are willing to bet on. “What results is a truth greater than one man’s opinion.”

Unlike traditional crowd-sourcing  and collaborative intelligent systems that focus on interacting with others to harness the collective wisdom of the crowd for generating new and better trading ideas, we apply a counter-intuitive version of crowd-sourcing. How? By peering into the mind-space and perception fields of decision makers, we can unlock the sum non-linear biases and mis-perceptions of the crowd: measurement errors of the total decision-making audience — not just those in the market today, but spanning the decision-making strategy variants that are accessible based on the myriad of ways trends can be observed and measured in the forward versions of today’s marketplace reality.

Whereas traditional Crowd-Sourcing and Prediction Markets need non-gamed information, acquired from locally informed sources, to aggregate as a prerequisite for predicting accurately, Crowd Physics 2.0 is not off-limits to seeing how the web of communication among market players, with limited insights into future events, would respond in the marketplace from the vantage points of their aggregate perception biases.

Embracing this New Standard of Social Intelligence — for Curating Perceptions and Behavioral Experiences from Forward Versions of the Marketplace Ecology to Fit the Local Needs of Today’s Decision-Making Audience — Running Alpha Adds New Context to Crowd-Sourcing; Launching the New Revolution of “Future-Sourcing.”

To analyze, and add meaning and sensibility to this special configuration of market observations, Efrem has formalized a new geometric object, that can now, for the first time, be overlaid on a standard price chart, for putting boundaries around future events, with particular application for helping decision-makers build strategic plans that offer more options for exploiting fat-tailed opportunities in the final moments of decision-making.

How? — By tracing out the sum non-linear-effect of the future Jet-Stream Behaviors of Investor Sentiment Biases, that are simultaneously driving forward price momentum and volatility changes over a broad spectrum of time-lines. The price and time coordinates that house this future shape of market space is nature’s way of efficiently encoding and revealing all relevant information about how different market participants are absorbing and reacting to both new events, as well as their own complex web of open-market transaction activities.

This is important because it opens new ground in economic and financial forecasting, for capturing early insights into critical states that lead to more dramatic expressions of sensitive dependence on initial and evolving conditions — deterministic chaos in scientific parlance.

Although many of today’s leading market research platforms focus on generating heat-maps that give you a global view of tick-by-tick changes in stock market performance indices, they fall short on: (i) delivering an unambiguous forward-looking message; and (ii) offering clues into the evolution of component-level returns, and showing how their cross-correlation among component combinations change over time.

What makes Running Alpha’s Heat Mapping technology different, lies in its usage of a universal mapping function for calibrating heat levels to the shape of these forward Sentiment Jet-Stream Biases; thereby, enabling investors to make consistent apples to-apples comparisons of forward performance and diversification efficiency among component securities.

During those forward intervals when the shape and orientation of the Sentiment Jet-Stream patterns of two or more portfolio components become more tightly coupled, they are said to exhibit an increasing bias for future correlation. For maximum diversification benefits, securities with non-overlapping Jet-Streams should be selected first.

Access to Micro ( weekly horizon ) and Macro Maps ( monthly horizons ), displaying these Sentiment Jet-Stream formations over weekly and monthly intervals, are premium features made available, upon request, for each portfolio component in Running Alpha’s flagship offering of Alpha Ideas: the Grid 100 and Focus 15 service plans.

To advance our capabilities in these areas, for the better part of 18 years, Running Alpha’s founder and Model Architect, Efrem Hoffman has conducted ongoing scientific investigations for addressing the most elemental themes about human market dynamics, namely, personal influence and salience of the decision-making stakeholders, and diffusion and viral propagation of information — that telegraph market contagion; as well as the changing shapes and sizes of social & investor sentiment feedback networks, which gives rise to these attributes. To this end, Efrem’s weapons of analysis have found their home at the intersection of where first principles of Quantum Physics meets the Mathematical of Social Interaction.

Having been:

a guest speaker on Artificial Intelligent  ( AI ) Design and 3D Interactive Visual Decision Support ( VDS ) Applications for trade management in the Spring of 1997, as well as an active participant at an elite private trading tutorial series in Houston, Texas, run by a 36+ year veteran trader and professional behavioral trading psychology coach — instrumental in successfully transforming the science of chaos theory into practice in a live trading room,

Efrem was:

(i)  discovered at this tutorial by a prominent and extra-ordinarily profitable ex-Chicago floor trading professional in the S&P  & Treasury Bond Futures Pits, and later invited to serve as his apprentice in the late 90s — applying unique quant strategies & software design insights in exchange for professional real-life trading instruction on exploiting the inter-market trading book relationships that drive successful speculation in Futures, Equity & Currency Option Arbitrage markets; and

(ii)  later introduced in 1998 — by another member of the tutorial — to a celebrity physicist who: (a) won the overall People’s Choice Award at the 1993 Windows World Open, earning a nomination by Microsoft for the Smithsonian Award, after making courtroom history — by developing the first computer model that generated new evidence for a successful defense in a high-profile criminal trial; and (b) studied under the inventor of BASIC computer language, Dr. John Kemeny, and Dr. Winterberg, a student of Albert Einstein and Heisenberg, respectively; and (c) periodically served as Efrem’s trusted software design and numerical modeling mentor and scientific colleague from 1998 to 2005.

Entrusting these experiences with passion and dedication for helping people connect the dots and think through alternative solutions, Efrem makes it his business each and every day to launch deep theory into live trading practice.

In the spirit of the former Hedge Fund Superstar, Curtis Macnuyen, Efrem is passionately absorbed in putting his Running Alpha Intelligence Engine to work for you in:

“Finding Truly Epic Trading Setups, Where You Have To Be a Little Bit Right To Make A Lot Of Money And A Lot Wrong To Lose A Little Bit Of Money.”

Well connected to the Bay Street Community in Toronto, Canada, Efrem regularly provides active research counsel to boutique portfolio managers and preeminent independent value-oriented investment research firms that are grounded in deep physics and forensic analysis of balance sheet valuations. Combined with expanding international interests from wealth management practitioners outside of Canada, Efrem’s contributions and networking opportunities in the quantitative financial services sector are building on his 18 years of enterprising knowledge in the domain of Mathematical Physics, Behavioral Finance, and Quantum Decision-Making.

Efrem hopes that with his company, he can play an inspirational role in helping investors and business executives have pain-free experiences on their journey toward better decision-making.

His vision is to see Running Alpha as a leading part of a story for rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature, to better exploit uncertainty, and compensate for the human condition and machine biases that get in our way of both perceiving world events in high-definition and making bold decisions with attention to detail.

When Efrem is resetting his trading psyche for the next day’s Battle for Investment Survival,” he shares his time between letting off steam at the gym and Varsity track, and celebrating his life with his best friend — and wife of 18+ months.

The Bottom Line to Efrem’s On Going Research is:

• The events we perceive as ordinary every-day occurrences are actually born out of the background noise of prior crisis and unusual market aberrations.
• Thus by focusing on the rare 1% Outliers rather than eliminating them, the agenda is to gain clarity on the 99% of market pressures that influence decisions each trading day!
• New Perceived Risk & Capital Asset Valuation Framework, founded on Leadership Rotation of Asset Class Rankings delivers:
• Portable, Low-Cost Tail-Risk Solutions for Professional Managers looking to
• “Hedge-For-A-Profit” in All-Volatility Environments with Absolute Alpha.