Empirical Private Investment Office is structured around the private capital, professional trading operations, and privately held investments of Robert Nash—a professional trader who has traded his own capital for more than 35 years. We run a specialized trading operation on the market auction process in crude oil derivatives, where institutional positioning, high‑frequency trading, and algorithmic strategies converge. We extend our trading operation to a select circle of global investors through exclusive agreements, special purpose vehicles, and dedicated accounts.

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. 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.

Understanding institutional activity and market auction dynamics—combined with pattern recognition, institutional market intelligence, and high-speed algorithms enables us to profit from the market auction process. We employ sophisticated trading technology to enable conviction at scale. Performance is a reflection of position sizing and trade frequency—and is dictated by price action, order flow, volatility, liquidity, sentiment, and asymmetric risk.

​A​s a private investment office ​we keep our private circle small, yet our trading operation ​has institutional capacity. Our trading operation is a powerful enabler, delivering our investors a way to generate and readily access liquidity that can flow into other ventures.​ Collaboration offers many possibilities. We have a strong ethos of reciprocity, where liquidity is not an end but a beginning​. We invest in,​ and support ventures and human endeavors that embody vision, possibility, and purpose.

We are active across different global time zones—Chicago, London, Singapore. We are the powerhouse of liquidity.