My name is Tom Danielson. I live in Milton, Massachusetts with my wife, two kids, dog and chickens.
I am a curious math-person and have always enjoyed when something clicks, whether it is in my own understanding or in a collaborator, friend or colleague. I am especially fulfilled when I can catalyze discovery, clarity or understanding for others.
Other than a proclivity to drag math into anything (like nutrition), I garden and enjoy distance running. As a kid I had an aversion to misleading #s. To wit:
In elementary school I thought it odd that a large ketchup could sometimes cost more per ounce than a normal size (found unit prices more helpful and confused that they were not more prominent).
Sports cards were my favorite playground, annoyed that FG% on basketball cards merged 2- and 3-pointers. Though I did not concoct a blended statistic, I did multiply 3P% by 1.5x (to compare to FG% - thinking 33% was good enough to shoot many 3s).
I was an Applied Math concentrator at Brown University and spent the first 24 years of my career at Cambridge Associates and Wellington Management as a central quantitative resource, helping investors bring a bit of math into their processes. This experience transformed me from a quant who liked math and found humans confounding to someone who finds math to be the least interest part of my work.
While these tours provided exposure to a wide variety of problems and circumstances across hundreds of clients, both were governed by the priority to spend time on work that clearly scaled. So called one-off work was rarely valued, reserved only for the most prominent clients where it could be justified.
Since starting tailored quant, I understand that my corporate experience was a several decade bootcamp. My clients benefit from the speed and efficiency of disciplined triage with an experienced investment quant who has been trained to listen and clarify and test my understanding and our alignment along the way, but with a project scope that is their decision.
If you suspect that a conversation could be worth your time, please reach out contact.