Empirical Private Investment Office is structured around the private capital and professional trading operations of Robert Nash—a professional trader with more than 35 years of experience, and a deep understanding of market behavior, institutional order flow, and market making operations. We integrate order flow, volume, and liquidity data—powering an auction-driven trading operation in the crude oil market—where institutional positioning, high‑frequency trading, and algorithmic strategies converge.

The global oil market is a dynamic arena and deeply tied to geopolitics, economic speculation, and market sentiment. It's shaped by a complex interplay of financial instruments, speculative flows, and algorithmic strategies. In the past the daily trading volume of oil derivatives was roughly similar to daily oil consumption. Today the ratio is 60 to 1, which means that if 100 million barrels per day are being consumed globally, 6 billion oil derivatives are traded.

Institutions, banks, and hedge funds—the players who actually move the market—can’t place billion-dollar bets without leaving a trace. The process of accumulating or distributing their massive positions leaves giant footprints. Large players build positions over days or weeks, while market makers and high-frequency traders exploit intraday fluctuations. Price volatility is the visible outcome of this entangled behavior, where sentiment, speculation, and institutional positioning overlap. 

What looks like noise and chaos is in fact engineered manipulation designed to uncover liquidity and drive momentum. The purpose of the market is to facilitate trade. We identify market dynamics as a continuous auction process that reveals asymmetries not apparent to most market participants—such as institutional liquidity manipulation where large players deliberately push price to capture liquidity—and institutional directional positioning that can drive the price for several days, weeks, and sometimes months.

The crude oil market is a continuous auction on a massive scale. By aligning with the flow and depth of market we capture small price movements across global time zones. We employ sophisticated trading technology to enable conviction to scale volume in‑and‑out with the market auction, accumulating profits with minimal market risk. Performance reflects position sizing, trade frequency, and trade volume—the scale is dictated by the depth of liquidity.

We trade our own capital—yet have the technology to extend our auction‑driven trading operation—delivering partners superior returns while ensuring high liquidity.