Ken Nakayama has over 25 years of experience in quantitative finance and trading and began his career at Bankers Trust marketing derivatives to hedge funds and other institutional money managers. He subsequently founded and headed equity derivatives and trading research at Deutsche Bank, and together with his team won numerous awards for best-in-class research from Institutional Investor (including a 1st place All-American ranking for Equity Derivatives Research), Risk Magazine, and Euromoney. Ken later traded a statistical arbitrage strategy for Deutsche Bank, then joined Barclays Global Investors (now BlackRock) to head systematic volatility trading and research. He was also the "tipster" behind a May 2001 article in Barron's that questioned Bernard Madoff's legitimacy—the only article in a major publication to raise these questions.

Today, Ken is a principal of Chord Asset Management, which runs a statistical arbitrage hedge fund.  Ken is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School and a member of its secondary school committee in Los Angeles, a CFA Charterholder, a finance industry mentor and selection committee member for UCLA's Sharpe Fellows and Simon Fellows programs, and a mentor for UCLA’s Masters of Financial Engineering program. Ken and his wife Lori have three boys, who are all Echo Horizon School alumni.