Richard L. Peterson


Dr. Richard L. Peterson is an American behavioral economist and psychiatrist.
He has developed behavioral finance-based quantitative models, imaged the brains of test subjects while play-trading, and is a writer and consultant in the psychology of financial decisions and the mining of sentiment in social media.
Dr. Peterson developed text mining software to identify and quantify economically predictive sentiments, and speaks widely in the area of behavioral finance and social media analytics.

Life

Dr. Peterson graduated from the University of Texas, with a BS cum laude in Electrical Engineering, a BA, and Doctor of Medicine degrees. He performed postdoctoral neuroeconomics research at Stanford University, is Board-certified in Psychiatry, and is a visiting scholar at Claremont Graduate University.
He is an investment advisor and managing director of the sentiment analysis firm MarketPsych Data and the psychology-based quantitative asset management firm MarketPsy Capital. In the educational field he developed financial personality tests, published in academic journals and textbooks, and is an associate editor of the Journal of Behavioral Finance. In 2007, Dr. Peterson wrote Inside the Investor's Brain, which translated behavioral finance concepts from academia to a lay audience. In 2016 he published Trading on Sentiment, which explained sentiment-based patterns in financial market prices.
Dr. Peterson has appeared in CBS Evening News, CNBC, NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review.
He lives in California with his family.

Academic journal articles