How retail traders, new markets & AI reshape finance.

I'm an assistant professor of finance at Texas State University's McCoy College of Business. My research asks how real investors actually behave — why retail traders gamble on stock and Bitcoin options, how banking access shapes who participates in crypto, and how markets price political uncertainty in real time.

Alongside the empirical work, I think hard about what AI means for finance — as a research method, as a teaching challenge, and as a force reshaping the industry. I've spoken on treating AI as a teammate rather than a tool, and my current projects apply textual analysis and machine learning to retail investor behavior.

I teach across the undergraduate and graduate finance curriculum, and I care about preparing students to think well alongside AI — the subject of my workshop "AI as a Teammate, not a Tool" at Texas State's AI in Teaching and Learning Symposium.