Meet the Team
Ophir Gottlieb
CEO & Co-founder
Ophir Gottlieb is the CEO & Co-founder of Capital Market Laboratories®. He has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Yahoo! Finance, CNNMoney, MarketWatch, and both Reuters and Factset on their respective professional terminals.
He is a former option market maker on the NYSE ARCA and CBOE exchange floors, and a former hedge fund manager and lead trader for Governance Investors.
He is an analyst of record and contributor through the Thomson First Call / Refinitiv / IBES approved analyst group and terminals as well as a contributor to the Factset consensus and terminals.
He has turned a part of his focus away from institutional finance and re-dedicated his life to helping all people find the capacity and facility to invest with the same confidence and information available to only the top 0.1%.
Current readers of CML Pro research include more than 500 institutions like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Alliance Bernstein, Bank of America, UBS, Tiger Global, Citadel, Citi, Dodge & Cox, Franklin Templeton, and hundreds more. But, in addition, tens of thousands of retail investors also receive the same research at the same time as the institutions.
Ophir Gottlieb is the inventor of the Forensic Alpha Model (FAM) and a co-inventor of Accounting and Governance Risk Model (AGR), both now owned commercially by MSCI. SSRN lists his research, as one of the earliest scientists to identify deep learning, and in particular, neural networks, as a novel approach to examining financial markets while also whole wholeheartedly incorporating corporate governance.
Mr. Gottlieb’s methodological approach taken in creating FAM 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. Ophir is also the inventor of the ‘Fraud Swap,’ the first and only mathematically verified derivative to swap the risk of fraud out of a stock portfolio. He initiated work on the Fraud Swap while at Stanford University and upon completion was endorsed for that work by Kay Giesecke, a Professor of Management Science & Engineering at the University.
In furthering his analysis and the patent pending derivative, Ophir presented his findings at the 72nd CFA Institute Annual Conference held in London in 2019 covering AI and the Future: Developments, Ethics, and Financial Transformation. A full video of his presentation and the patent pending mathematics and derivative are available here.
The Huffington Post dedicated an article to Ophir’s views in the dossier Financial Services Third Wave of Innovation: AI & Machine Learning. A rare view into his vision of the world of finance, including a 20 minute video session.
Mr. Gottlieb’s mathematics, measure theory, and machine learning background stems from his graduate work in financial mathematics at Stanford University.
James A. Kaplan
Chairman & Co-founder
Mr. Kaplan is a founding director of MarketWatch, and is widely recognized as one of the grandfather’s of modern portfolio theory.
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 was 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. 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
Chief Technology Officer
Jason Hitchings is the Chief Technology Officer at CML. 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.
Tom White
Chief Information Officer
Aleksandar Ilic
web developer