Raymond M. Mullaney
Author · Founder · Investor
Raymond M. Mullaney has spent five decades studying financial statements, building quantitative systems to measure investment risk, and challenging the assumptions that put ordinary investors in harm's way.
In 1982, he founded a full-service NASD broker-dealer and an SEC-registered investment advisory firm. In 1985, he served on President Reagan's White House Conference on Small Business.
In 1986, the New York Times quoted his economic report on its front page — warning about market risk. The crash came the following year.
In September and October 2000, Mullaney submitted detailed reports to the SEC warning that GE and Cisco — then the two most valuable companies in the world — had produced misleading earnings. The SEC acknowledged receipt. Three weeks later, Dr. Abraham Briloff published a major exposé on the same subject in Barron's. Within months, both stocks collapsed — Cisco down 75%, GE down 37% — destroying over two-thirds of a trillion dollars in investor wealth.
In 2013, he founded Equity Risk Sciences (ERS), developing proprietary quantitative tools that rate the probability and magnitude of stock price changes using only SEC-filed financial data and 35 years of price history.
In 2020, Forbes asked Mullaney to select one strong and one weak company using ERS's technology. Over the following year, his strong pick — BorgWarner — returned 58%, compared to 38% for the S&P 500. His risky pick — Bristol-Myers — returned just 9%. The pattern, he argues, is always the same: when you measure what others won't measure, you can see what others can't see.
He also founded The Fiduciary Mandate, a public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to advancing quantitative standards of care in the investment industry. IBM: Nobody Looked applies the same analytical rigor to a single, iconic American corporation — documenting what the numbers revealed, and why no one in the chain of responsibility acted on them.
Mullaney operates from offices in Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts.