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David S. Wood

David Sargent Wood, Ph.D., is Co-Chief Investment Officer, Senior Managing Director at Nuveen Brooklyn, where he leads portfolio technology development and runs the portfolio management team, including the firm's day-to-day systematic investment processes. Before Nuveen's 2025 acquisition of Brooklyn, he... more

Positions

Education

Friction with the object is traction;
friction between egos is merely heat.

— The Bauhütte Standard: reality before loyalty

Everything becomes available.
But availability is not the same as possession.

— Cognitive resignation: LLM and the hollowing of expertise

Simplicity is therefore not a nicety;
it is the precondition for accountable engineering judgment.

— Worse is better and the right thing

A person is not a function.
You can’t invoke it repeatedly without side effects.

— Reflections on financial advisory and portfolio management

What survives in language is not always what is true. It is what catches. We catch our concepts as we catch a cold.

— Co-Brain: l’approche de la mer, and why AI may never emerge from LLMs

An A player is not the person who makes the room feel best. An A player is the person who makes the work truer.

— Hiring against the room

A good-looking company becomes good when it allows itself to be corrected by the world.

— Good companies and good-looking companies: lost dimensions of work

Insight changes the sentence. Practice changes the weights.

— Deep persuasion: grokking, storehouse, and weights

For the larger argument behind these essays, see Minds, Machines, Models: on the power of models, and the danger of forgetting what they model.

Blog and Essays

  1. The Bauhütte Standard: reality before loyalty
  2. Co-Brain: l’approche de la mer, and why AI may never emerge from LLMs
  3. Deep persuasion: grokking, storehouse, and weights
  4. Hiring against the room
  5. Bend the chimney; move the firewood
  6. Worse is better and the right thing
  7. Good companies and good-looking companies: lost dimensions of work
  8. Cognitive resignation: LLM and the hollowing of expertise
  9. How much customization should a financial platform offer?
  10. Markov processes and Kolmogorov equations
  11. Reflections on financial advisory and portfolio management
  12. Understanding long and short margin mechanics
  13. Deep learning at scale: lesson from experiments from Perlmutter
  14. Scalable GPU programming for exascale: multi-node and multi-GPU strategies
  15. From bricolage to engineering: regularizing complexity
  16. Bayesian deep learning: uncertainty, inductive bias, and modern theory
  17. Selling modern financial products: comparing SMAs, SaaS, and asset management
  18. From physical toil to cognitive burnout: modern labor and the ethics of software design
  19. Internal states, external worlds: concurrency, consensus, and sociotechnical challenges in computing
  20. Engineering speak: prolegomena to ideal technical discourses
  21. Self-healing computation: building resilient financial computational services
  22. Cognitive mirror: how LLMs compress language and challenge our sense of self
  23. Basis trade and treasury deleveraging
  24. The Triffin dilemma and the exorbitant privilege
  25. Client-side connection pool management
  26. Zoo keeping: dynamic assembling based on subclass attributes
  27. Go getters: a monadic way
  28. Take a walk on the functional side: yes, we need monads
  29. Working with distributed workers
  30. Cooperative concurrency with FastAPI: it's the generators, stupid
  31. Wrapping around wrappers: a primer on Python decorators
  32. Simple SSL-based encryption

Research Statement

My research operates at the intersection of high-dimensional financial time series, modern applied mathematics, and computational physics. I’ve always gravitated toward non-parametric, structure-seeking techniques—drawing on geometry, spectral methods, and ideas inspired by quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. I view… more

Research

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© 2011–2026 David Sargent Wood