Hi, my name is Steve McCarthy and I am a financial analyst living in Fort Lauderdale, Fl. I have spent the last 16 years of my career helping investors leverage large datasets to make sounder investment decisions.
I first came to understand the importance of incorporating data analysis into investment selection while working at a structured finance hedge fund at the peak of the mortgage crisis. While there I was able to convince the principals of the fund that loan level data offered key insights, and we were later able to take advantage of those insights to not only improve our own results, but to also expand our business into helping investors that had been burned by their own manager's inability to analyze large datasets.
I then joined Kroll Bond Rating Agency, a 12 person startup at the time that had yet to rate its first deal, and implemented a mortgage model that has since been used to rate hundreds of transactions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. I also helped KBRA design a mortgage data warehouse and published a number of research pieces that presented novel approaches to analyzing mortgage databases.
I then ventured out on my own to form a FinTech company that hosted a large database of auto loans to help investors and rating agencies analyze the credit risk in their portfolios. While the company ultimately was not successful, I am proud of our accomplishments and some of the insights we were able to offer the market, particularly during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. The code we developed has been open sourced and is available here: . Some of our former clients plan to continue utilizing the software internally.
Along the way I have published a number of research pieces that showed investors how they could use large datasets to make smarter investments.