Who am I?

As you might have guessed, my name is Dave Coker. I’m an expatriate New Yorker who has lived in London since 1997.

A programmer by virtue of my Undergraduate education (Math & Computer Science), and a Finance professional (MSc Quantitative Finance), I learned my Unix at AT&T Bell Labs in the mid 1980s, moved to Linux as soon as, and I’m most definitely a Macintosh freak.

I’ve worked in Investment Banking and Fintech since the late 1980’s when I started my career in New York with Dow Jones programming in C, building Market Analytics and bond pricing software. I next moved to Deutsche Bank, where I spent the bulk of my career as Vice President of Global Risk Management. There I undertook extensive programming in a wide variety of languages, mostly on Sun and IBM workstations (SunOS and AIX), building technology solutions to meet the regulatory challenge. In later years at Deutsche Bank I moved away from hands on coding and into management, then senior management roles, but still responsible for Fintech.

While at Moody‘s I was responsible for Professional Services in Europe, The Middle East and Africa, and was responsible globally for resources; again, this was a technology heavy role. While at ABN AMRO I was Global Programme Manager Risk Management Technology. Needless to say, I’ve seen Investment Banking and applied technology from a wide variety of perspectives, and have helped create modern Fintech.

I’m constantly exploring and adopting new technology. In fact I spend most weekends in my study programming — lots of code slinging with spaCy these days — early evenings with my wife at the pub, and late nights with my band Tweets of Rage.

I have several cloud resident computers deployed from across the globe which I use for a wide variety of purposes, all running Ubuntu Linux.

Internationally educated, I’m completing a PhD in Finance (Zurich), currently hold an MSc in Quantitative Finance (London), an MBA (London), studied Mathematics & Computer Science at the Undergraduate level (New York), and, most importantly, I’ve been a lifelong Student of the Markets, achieving financial independence in 2002.

I currently write and sell market commentary to several banks and hedge funds, consult on Credit Risk to a Global Tier 1 Investment Bank, and teach finance & fintech in London.

In May 2020 I was published in Wiley’s The AI Book, where I outline the possibility of using Machine Learning to avoid financial crisis.

I’m a polished and effective public speaker, sometimes presenting on finance to private clients as many as six times a week in The City of London or Canary Wharf (out of term, of course). I’ve also made several media appearances, once again on the subject of finance.