Peter Schafer, CFA, CFP®
Eighteen years in wealth management, portfolio management, and hedge-fund investing.
I build conviction from primary sources — filings, transcripts, and management's own words — and I built a system that holds me to it.
The system
The Conviction Research System reads primary sources — SEC and foreign filings, market data, company transcripts — and published research, and turns them, with my judgment, into conviction scores. Every position in the book is written down with its date, its thesis, and the condition that would prove it wrong. A person rules on every change to its rules.
The goal is a system that improves itself — one that grades its own prior calls and adjusts its method when the record says the method was wrong. Today it audits itself; the calibration page shows how far that has gone.
Corrected 2026-09-18. Page rewritten; prior version shown below. The about text made two statements about the system that its records do not support: that its rules change only when graded calls say so, and that each figure in a score comes from a document, when some score inputs are the author's own judgment.
Prior version, replaced 2026-09-18
Peter Schafer, CFA, CFP®
Public & private markets investor · Disruptive technology & real assets.
Eighteen years across wealth management, portfolio management, and hedge-fund investing.
Most recently Managing Director at United Capital Management of Kansas, leading research and idea generation across public equities and private markets on two theses: disruptive technology (AI, robotics, space, defense, energy, quantum) and real assets in a world of rising debt and currency debasement.
Before that, SVP Portfolio Manager at First Western Trust, and thirteen years at Fidelity.
I build conviction through primary-source research — filings, transcripts, and management's own words — and I've built a system that holds me to it.
I want to look back in fifteen years and point at something I built.
What it is isn't decided; that it will be built is.
If you're working on something great in this space and want someone who does the fundamental work and is willing to be wrong on the record, write me: contact@pschafer.com.
The system
The Conviction Research System is a financial model built for recursive self-improvement, with a person holding every gate. It grades its own calls against the filings that arrive after them, and its rules change only on that evidence, creating a loop.
It uses agent bots to pull and read primary sources — SEC and foreign filings, market data, company transcripts — and turns them into conviction scores in which every number traces back to the document it came from. It also keeps a selective roster of people worth tracking — writers, executives, investors — chosen for making calls that are dated and checkable, and kept only while their record holds.
Every call the model makes is written down with its date, its thesis, and the condition that would prove it wrong. The same ledger that grades the people it tracks grades the bots, the drafting model, and the pipeline, and no rule changes without a person ruling on it.
The system · calibration · the journey · the book.
contact@pschafer.com · linkedin.com/in/peter-schafer