Mike Picone is a private investor with 30 years experience, emphasizing domestic stocks and classic fundamental analysis. He has a strong interest in developing trading and asset allocation strategies that respond optimally to changing economic and market conditions and to the availability of only imperfect information. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and has based his scientific career on separating, ranking, and analyzing the factors underlying complex observations. From time to time, this has led to practical solutions of longstanding problems. He finds the financial markets to be a particularly fertile field for investigating and developing techniques of data analysis and for separating legitimate inferences from misleading ones. Any published articles represent a personal breakthrough in thought on the essence of a given problem and on the basic elements of a solution.