Curiosity - The untold stories of Charlie Q Yang’s works that led to a new world

At the age of ten, I studied the Electronics magazines and assembled the first 9" TV for my family. Because of my strong curiosity, I have ventured into mathematics, computer, engineering, technology, science, and finance. I followed my passion and pursued research as a hobby throughout my life. I love to challenge myself to solve the most fascinating real-world problems. Here you can find a brief summary of my favorite discoveries in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Finance.

Synopsis

  • Charlie Q Yang was born in Shanghai, China. His childhood dream was to be a self-taught engineer, scientist, and philosopher. His parents are medical doctors and have little influence on his career choices due to the cultural revolution.
  • He studied at the University of Victoria (Canada) with Dr. Vijay K. Bhargava on digital communications before going on to the wireless industry and then financial services.
  • Following his deep passion for applying signal detection techniques to the capital market, he has conducted independent research on investor behavior since 1996 and dedicated his time on education, research, and technology.
  • In particular, Yang developed the BB-Sigma Index as a real-time investor psychology measuring system for scientifically back-testing and validating his Capital Market Behavior Theory.

Passion in Investor Behavior Research

  • When pursuing a Master of Applied Science and Ph.D. in Wireless Communication Theory in Canada from 1988 - 1993, Fascinated by the capital market's "random" behavior and its similarity to signal detection over noise, I studied economics and financial markets at the Canadian Securities Institute in 1992. I could not help to become passionate about investment research and moved to the U.S. in early 1995.
  • While trying to improve statistical modeling for wireless communications from 1993 to 1995 at Bell-Northern Research Laboratories, I discovered "Q-Distribution" for modeling probabilities named after my middle initial. The new family of statistical distributions unifies the most popular normal distribution, log-normal distribution, and others. It further excited me for its potential applications in many fields as a goodness-of-fit improvement over the normal distribution (bell curve). I documented my findings in a working paper titled "Q-Distributions - A Family of Generalized Normal Distributions." This unpublished piece has continuously motivated me to further discover the underlying scientific principles governing capital market behaviors.
  • Increasingly I realize that most existing financial market research, including many Nobel Prize works, are very superficial and incredibly flawed and built on unrealistic and oversimplified assumptions. They can be easily misapplied and mislead the financial industry's product development and ultimately harmful to investors. Investor psychology drives the capital market movement. It is more difficult to quantify than my earlier engineering problems.
  • Luckily, my work experiences, including 16 years at Charles Schwab, have offered me the opportunity to serve investors for their needs and also the possibility to provide investor education through interviewing thousands of investors and observing and understanding their real-life stories. Daily job allows my creative thinking to continue. Most of my research was proprietary in the past, including the fat-tailed and skewed probability distributions for modeling stock prices and asset return statistics (the new Q-Distributions or Black Swan Model), the theory of capturing and measuring crowd emotion (the new Investor Emotion Index or BB-Sigma Index), and the uniformed portfolio evaluation method (the new Theme-Based Benchmarks and the Calmar-Yang Ratio), among many others. I have started to share these scientific findings with all investors.​

Attempts to Challenge the Financial Industry

  • The general understanding of the financial industry has been that return and risk are real and fundamental. We all have been positive for the capital market descriptions by Nobel Prize-winning works.  That led us to believe that the modern portfolio theory and related research are accurate descriptions of the market.
  • Many of us have seen evidence that return and risk are not fundamental and just derived concepts. In 1995 when I discovered how flawed the bell-curve could become when being used as a statistical model, I started to question the financial industry’s academic foundation. What Wall Street has been using are all the derived measures from the flawed theory. They are just emergent ideas and all built on over-simplified assumptions on their roots. They can be so easily misused and even cause a financial crisis.
  • My research passion is to discover the scientific principles governing each trading tick’s movement (similar to atoms in physics). I have committed to capturing my findings through the framework named the Capital Market Behavior Theory. After the engineering system I developed validates each of my discoveries, we will finally understand the actual fundamental ingredients that make up our investment concepts of return and risk.
One serious problem in our financial industry today is lacking scientific standards and practical tools to uncover many flawed investment strategies. Informed investors must empower themselves and learn how to measure the added value, if any, of their investment advisory to prevent losses due to misleading claims and fees.
- Charlie Q. Yang (1996)

My Current Research and Education Websites

Earlier Professional Experiences

  • Over the last 30+ years, many career opportunities allowed me to gain experience in international marketing, investment banking and research, and technology management. I served as the founding President of the American China International Business Association (ACIBA) (1997 - 2003), and invited as a guest speaker at leading Asian TV stations, including LA Channel 18; ETTV America; Phoenix TV North America; and China Business Network.
  • After 16 years of offering wealth management services, I retired from Charles Schwab as Vice President - Senior Financial Consultant. Before Schwab, I was the Managing Director of Global Investment Banking at American Eastern Securities (2001 - 2003), a Member of NASD and SIPC, and appointed as the portfolio manager of Luminus Pacific Rim Fund, a member of Luminus Hedge Funds, one of the top funds ranked by Nelson World's Best Money Managers in 2001.
  • During my earlier life, I was fortunately to have various opportunities to work for several publicly traded companies, including Vice President - acting branch manager at Asia Pacific Services of Charles Schwab (NASDAQ: SCHW) in 2006, and previous experiences as a Software Engineer and Assistant General Manager (startup of Wang China Limited in Shanghai) at Wang Laboratories (NYSE: WANG) (1984 -1988), Business Planner at Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT) (1993 - 1995), Product Line Manager at General Motor Hughes Electronics (NYSE: GM) (1995 - 1997), Director at Watkins-Johnson (NYSE: WJ) (1997 - 1998), Vice President of ZTE Corporation to lead the startup of ZTE USA (1998, appointed only), President and CEO of Datang Xinwei Telecom Technology (creator of TD-SCDMA technology) (1998 - 2000), Chief Executive Officer at Hartcourt Companies (Frankfurt/OTC: HRCT) (2000 - 2001).
  • I was honored to become the featured CEO selected by the China Electronic Enterprise magazine (ISSN 1007-2098, published in December 1999) for leading product advancement towards international standards and 3G wireless evolution. As a non-profit initiative sponsoring scientific research projects and investor education, I founded the Institute of Systematic Investment Research (ISIR) (1996 - 2003) which was relaunched to become Alpha Financial Institute offering free research and education starting 2019.

Earlier Research and Education Background

My Scientific Ventures

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein