DA David Anderle Systems, risk, and decision-making
Official website

David Anderle

UW–Madison exchange student Informatics, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Systems, risk, and decision-making

I build models for financial risk, system stress, and decisions made under pressure.

I am David Anderle, an Informatics student from Prague currently studying on exchange at UW-Madison. I work on how markets, institutions, and technical systems behave when volatility rises, assumptions fail, and decisions still have to be made.

My strongest current signals are concrete rather than rhetorical: a Wisconsin Ideas Conference-selected policy memo on retail-investor protection, a working Volatility Cascade Engine with inspectable code and charts, and public-facing roles across student governance, sponsorship, and finance-adjacent project work.

View flagship work Download profile PDF Email
UW-Madison exchange CZU Prague - Informatics Wisconsin Ideas Conference selection
Current base
UW-Madison exchange year, with home institution at CZU Prague.
Primary lens
Systems thinking applied to volatility, incentives, contagion, and failure under stress.
Current proof
Conference-selected policy work, implemented simulation outputs, and public-facing institutional roles.
About

Who I am and what I am building

I study Informatics at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and am currently on exchange at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My work sits at the intersection of systems thinking, financial risk, market structure, and decision-making under uncertainty. I am most interested in what happens when models meet stress: when volatility rises, feedback arrives late, incentives distort behavior, or institutions have to decide with incomplete information.

Summary

I study systems that stop looking simple once the pressure is real.

The recurring question behind my work is straightforward: what makes a system hold together when the environment gets worse? That question appears in financial markets, organizations, policy, and technical systems, so I built this site to show one intellectual thread instead of a random list of interests.

Current work includes a Wisconsin Ideas Conference policy memo on retail-investor protection in high-volatility trading, student governance through the Associated Students of Madison, sponsor-facing work for CULS Racing, and the Volatility Cascade Engine, a working market-stress simulation with generated charts and network outputs. I am not trying to pretend finished expertise. I am trying to make direction, evidence, and standards unusually legible.

What the site is about

Clear identity signals, not vague branding

David Anderle Informatics UW–Madison Financial risk Systems thinking

The homepage now states the name, field, institutions, and themes in plain language so both people and search engines can understand what this profile is actually about.

Working standard

Evidence before inflated self-description

The site separates finished outputs, institutional roles, and long-horizon project builds. That keeps ambition visible without blurring the line between current proof and future direction.

Flagship work

Flagship work and implemented research build

This section now separates external validation from the strongest implemented model on the site. The result is a cleaner signal: one real public-policy output and one real technical build.

Current anchor

Retail investor behavior under volatility

A policy memo selected for the Wisconsin Ideas Conference, focused on transparency in social-media-driven investment content, risk warnings inside brokerage apps, and investor education during unstable trading periods.

  • Connects market behavior, interface design, and policy rather than treating them as separate problems.
  • Shows judgment about incentives, disclosure, and decision quality under stress.
  • Already has external validation through conference-track selection.
Status
Selected
Format
Policy memo
Signal
Real output
Implemented flagship Finance Simulation

Volatility Cascade Engine

TL;DR: A working simulation of how a shock in one asset can propagate through leveraged funds through mark-to-market losses, margin breaches, forced selling, and secondary price impact.

  • Problem: Losses in leveraged systems rarely scale smoothly once thresholds are crossed.
  • Approach: Simulated overlapping fund exposures, liquidation rules, and impact-driven feedback loops.
  • Output: Generated shock-to-loss curves, distress counts, and a fund-asset network snapshot.
Why this is primary: it is no longer just a concept. It is implemented, inspectable, and aligned with the site’s strongest themes.
Open project case study
Infrastructure Climate

Climate-resilient grid planning

TL;DR: Model how electric-grid reliability changes under climate stress and how investment decisions can be improved under uncertainty.

  • Problem: Grid systems face extreme-weather stress with uncertain future paths.
  • Approach: Reliability simulation plus risk-aware optimization.
  • Expected output: Scenario maps, resilience metrics, and upgrade tradeoff charts.
Open concept note
Operations Decision support

Global supply chain resilience

TL;DR: Design a decision-support project for supply networks facing disruption, delays, and uncertain demand shocks.

  • Problem: Multi-tier supply networks fail in ways that are hard to see until disruptions compound.
  • Approach: Network mapping, disruption simulation, and robust optimization.
  • Expected output: Resilience dashboards, critical-link maps, and scenario comparisons.
Open concept note
Profile

Snapshot

Education
University of Wisconsin–Madison exchange study. Home institution: Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Informatics.
Roles
Associated Students of Madison Student Council, CULS Racing sponsorship work, Aviation Club financial strategy involvement, and independent technical exploration.
Credibility signals
Wisconsin Ideas Conference policy memo track selection, international study path, cross-disciplinary work spanning policy, finance, and technical systems.
Standard
Prefer concrete work, sharper writing, and verifiable outputs over inflated language.
Core themes

Areas of concentration

Financial systems Volatility Derivatives Risk systems Market structure Policy analysis Engineering systems Decision-making under uncertainty

The common thread is not a theme chosen for branding. It is a real attraction to environments where structure matters, failure has consequences, and improvement depends on better models rather than louder claims.

Selected work

Projects, roles, and public-facing work

Each entry now leads with a clear summary, role context, and why it matters. Finished outputs, institutional roles, and active research directions stay visibly separate.

Policy Markets Selected for conference

Protecting retail investors in the post-memestock era

TL;DR: A policy memo on how platforms should communicate risk when volatility and social influence distort investor judgment.

  • Role: Author and researcher.
  • Approach: Combined market-structure thinking, interface design, and behavioral incentives.
  • Outcome: Selected for the Wisconsin Ideas Conference policy memo track.
Why it matters: it is the clearest current proof that the broader risk-and-systems direction already has a real public output.
Institutions Leadership

Associated Students of Madison Student Council

TL;DR: Governance work that turned abstract ideas about incentives and institutional design into live decision environments.

  • Role: Student representative in a multi-stakeholder decision setting.
  • Approach: Worked through competing priorities, public-facing judgment, and procedural tradeoffs.
  • Signal: Adds a governance layer to an otherwise technical profile.
Why it matters: strong analytical work is also about how organizations decide, not only about models on paper.
Engineering External relations

Formula Student sponsorship and partner outreach

TL;DR: Sponsor-facing work that required translating technical ambition into credible, useful external communication.

  • Role: Sponsorship and outreach support for a student racing team.
  • Approach: Prepared outreach, handled sponsor communication, and learned how technical projects earn external support.
  • Signal: Shows follow-through, persistence, and professional communication under real constraints.
Why it matters: the strongest profiles show execution as well as analysis.
Modeling Financial systems

Volatility Cascade Engine

TL;DR: A market-stress simulation that shows how small shocks can stay contained until leverage and liquidation rules push the system across a boundary.

  • Status: Implemented in Python with exported charts and network graphics.
  • Mechanics: Models overlapping exposures, margin thresholds, forced liquidations, and impact-driven secondary losses.
  • Result: Distressed funds appear around a 16% initial shock and system loss steepens as cascades begin.
Why it matters: this is a visible proof-of-thinking artifact, not just a future idea.
Aviation Finance strategy

Aviation Club financial strategy involvement

TL;DR: Student work that sat directly between constrained budgets, organizational priorities, and engineering culture.

  • Role: Finance-facing support inside a student aviation context.
  • Approach: Worked on budgeting, resource logic, and practical tradeoffs.
  • Signal: Strengthens the bridge between technical systems and financial decision-making.
Why it matters: the profile becomes stronger when disciplines connect through actual responsibilities.
Independent exploration Systems under stress

High-altitude and hard-environment systems interest

TL;DR: Ongoing technical curiosity around flight systems, sensing, environmental limits, and reliability under difficult conditions.

  • Focus: Failure modes, sensing constraints, and robustness when conditions become non-trivial.
  • Connection: The same systems lens that drives interest in market stress also appears in physical environments.
  • Signal: Broadens the profile without diluting it because the underlying thinking stays consistent.
Why it matters: it shows the systems identity is real, not a branding phrase attached to one domain only.
Case study

Volatility Cascade Engine

The engine starts with a shock in CHIP, revalues leveraged portfolios, checks for margin breaches, forces liquidations, and applies liquidation-driven price impact until the system stabilizes. The point is not forecasting. The point is showing threshold behavior clearly.

What it shows

Losses become cascades after a boundary

The model stays relatively contained under smaller shocks. Around a 16% initial shock, distressed funds begin to appear. By 20%, the system has three distressed funds and materially higher aggregate loss. That is the whole thesis in visible form.

Leverage Margin pressure Forced selling Price impact Network spillovers
Open full case study Download code
Chart showing shock size versus final system equity loss in the Volatility Cascade Engine
System loss accelerates once liquidations start feeding back into prices.
Chart showing shock size versus number of distressed funds in the Volatility Cascade Engine
The number of distressed funds jumps after the first margin breaches appear.
Fund-asset network after an initial CHIP shock
A fund-asset network view makes overlapping exposures and potential contagion paths legible.

The standard is not to sound impressive. The standard is to make the argument sharper, the evidence cleaner, and the finished work harder to dismiss.

Personal operating principle
Writing

Searchable work now, content engine next

The article layer now does two jobs at once: it creates indexable surface area around the right themes and it shows how the thinking actually sounds when expanded.

Timeline

Timeline with real milestones

A compressed version of the path so far, using actual milestones instead of abstract labels.

2025-2026

UW-Madison exchange year

Building an international academic track, improving communication, and raising the standard of both coursework and independent work in a more demanding environment.

2026

Wisconsin Ideas Conference policy memo track selection

Selected to present a policy memo on protecting retail investors in high-volatility trading, connecting market structure, platform design, and investor protection.

2025-ongoing

Student governance, sponsorship, and technical build work

Working across Associated Students of Madison, CULS Racing outreach, aviation-finance involvement, and independent system-modeling projects such as the Volatility Cascade Engine.