Erik Townsend
Erik Townsend is the Founder of Macro Voices. He was a successful technologist and entrepreneur during the 1990s technology boom and retired from the software industry in 1998. After a short hiatus, Townsend reinvented himself as a full-time private investor with a macroeconomic investing strategy. He capitalizes on his expertise in understanding complex systems and anticipating paradigm shifts far ahead of the mainstream. He has actively traded energy, grains, and precious metals futures markets since 2008 and has become a recognized expert in Peak Oil investing.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
- Townsend is a teenage computer protégé who spent most of his high school years at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- He taught himself several computer programming languages at MIT CSAIL.
- At age 17, he became an independent software development and design consultant to Digital Corporation.
- At age 20, he owned his first private aircraft after earning his private and commercial pilot's licenses.
- At age 21, he committed to developing and commercializing distributed application software technologies he was first exposed to at MIT.
- By the mid-1980s, he had invented an approach to distributed system design that is now widely known as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
- In 1992, he founded The Cushing Group, a boutique consultancy focused exclusively on bringing advanced distributed application computing technologies to market.
- In 1998, he had grown The Cushing Group to 35 employees, $10 million annual revenues, and 28% net operating income.
- He briefly engaged a well-known investment bank to manage his assets but was deeply disappointed with their services.
- He subsequently took a deep dive into fundamental investing and educated himself on the mechanics of derivatives trading.
- In 2013, he founded Fourth Turning Capital Management and launched a Global Macro-strategy hedge fund.
- He has given lectures to Parliament in Belgium and at the ASPO technical conference.
- He has become a financial podcast personality, having appeared regularly as the commodities commentator on a popular weekly financial program for several years.
TRAVEL
- Townsend is a passionate world traveler.
- He moved to Hong Kong in 2009 to get a better perspective on changing global e onomics.
- While living in Hong Kong, he was advised by his peers to launch his own hedge fund but he wanted to finish his comprehensive evaluation of the global economy first.
- He spent over 16 months in 2011 and 2012 exploring the world, living in 28 cities in 18 countries.
- He continues to live an international lifestyle and presently has homes in Hong Kong, Mexico, and the United States.