Christopher Lopez | Economics & Investment Management

Entrepreneurship

Explo Holdings

Explo Holdings is a holding company I founded in January 2026, operating across investment management and real estate development. The idea is simple: use data-driven research and disciplined capital allocation to compound wealth over the long term.

exploholdings.com

Explo Capital

An investment club structured as a California LLC, managing approximately $300K in assets for 10 members. The fund employs a concentrated long equity strategy powered by proprietary screening, with a covered call overlay for income generation, short puts to enter positions at favorable prices, and tail-risk hedging through out-of-the-money index puts.

Assets Under Management ~$300K

Members 10

Strategy Longs + Options Overlay

Research Platform Proprietary (Terminal)

Explo Properties

A real estate development arm focused on residential projects in the greater Los Angeles area. The first project is in Lancaster, CA, where we are building 2 accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and 1 new single-family residence on an existing lot, with a vertically integrated construction model. The long-term vision is to scale into investor-funded development projects with a dedicated construction team.

Focus Residential Development

Market Greater Los Angeles

Status 2 ADUs + 1 SFR Underway

Model Vertically Integrated

Research Platform

Finance Terminal

An equity research platform I built from scratch to power Explo Capital's investment process. The Terminal ingests 30 years of fundamental and price data, computes financial metrics, and runs a screening engine that helps identify investment opportunities worth a deeper look.

Python Streamlit DuckDB Plotly SQL ThreadPoolExecutor

7,717

Stocks Covered

30 yr

Historical Data

6.2 GB

Database Size

92.5%

Data Coverage

Smart Screener

The screening process scores every stock in the database across four pillars. Hard gates filter out companies that fail basic quality thresholds before scoring begins. The system runs daily, producing a ranked watchlist that feeds into the due diligence process.

30 pts

Valuation

25 pts

Quality

25 pts

Growth

20 pts

Momentum

20-Year Backtest Results

+19.1%

CAGR

+10.3%

Alpha vs. S&P 500

-37.9%

Max Drawdown

Finance Terminal — GOOGL chart view with candlestick pricing, metric overlays, and volume analysis

Finance Terminal — CMG valuation analysis with EPS growth-based fair value, percentile table, and historical P/E

Architecture

The platform has a Streamlit frontend, a SQL computation layer running inside DuckDB, and a local database holding over 20 million rows of financial metrics. Data is sourced from the Financial Modeling Prep API and refreshed daily.

8 database tables covering prices, financials, metrics, screener scores, and percentile levels

Automated daily pipeline refreshes prices, financials, recomputes all metrics, and rescores the universe

Long and short screeners with dedicated gate and scoring systems for each direction

Rolling position backtester with fair value exit, fundamental stop-loss, and subperiod robustness testing

Professional Experience

Vance Wealth

Investment Associate | March 2025 – November 2025

At Vance Wealth, a registered investment advisory firm, I worked across the full scope of portfolio management operations for a book of approximately $700 million in client assets. The role combined daily trading execution with quantitative research and process automation, giving me hands-on experience with institutional-grade investment workflows.

Quantitative Research

Built a direct indexing exclusion model that demonstrated 72 basis points of outperformance over the benchmark in 9 out of 10 years tested. Conducted statistical analysis investigating how leveraged firms perform in rising rate environments, producing findings that informed the equities in our direct indexing model.

Process Automation

Developed a Python pipeline for 401(k) mutual fund management that ingested Morningstar data to automate fund screening and comparison. Reduced the research workflow from multiple days of manual analysis to under five minutes, directly improving the team's capacity to service client retirement accounts.

Trading Operations

Managed daily trading operations for the firm's approximately $700 million book of business. Responsibilities included pre- and post-trade compliance checks, portfolio rebalancing across client accounts, wash sale rule monitoring, and execution of equity and fixed income trades through institutional platforms.

Portfolio Optimization

Conducted equity research and due diligence on alternative investments including private credit, real estate, and venture capital allocations. Executed tax loss harvesting strategies across client portfolios to optimize after-tax returns while maintaining target asset allocations.

Independent Research

Leverage & Economic Cycles

An independent research paper investigating the relationship between corporate leverage and economic cycles. This work builds on research begun during my time at Vance Wealth, where I found statistical evidence that leveraged firms outperform in rising rate environments.

The study uses 30 years of fundamental data from the Terminal platform, overlaid with Federal Funds Rate data from FRED, to examine how capital structure decisions interact with monetary policy regimes. The goal is to produce a publishable analysis that contributes to the corporate finance literature on leverage and macroeconomic sensitivity.

Coming Soon

Background

Education & Certifications

Education

California State University, Northridge

Bachelor of Arts in Economics

2020 – 2024

GPA: 3.7 | Minor: Finance

Certificate of Excellence (Dean & Department Chair)

Vice President, Python Coding in Economics Club

Academic Projects

Economic Indicators' Impact on Automotive Sales

Investigated the relationship between macroeconomic indicators and U.S. automotive sales using OLS regression. Built automated data collection pipelines with Selenium and BeautifulSoup, implemented ARIMA time series forecasting, and conducted statistical analysis with statsmodels.

Machine Learning for Customer Retention Prediction

Developed a logistic regression model using scikit-learn to predict customer churn. Focused on feature engineering, model evaluation via F1-score optimization, and translating model outputs into actionable business recommendations.

Certifications

IBM

IBM Data Science Professional Certificate

IBM via Coursera

IBM

IBM Machine Learning Professional Certificate

IBM via Coursera

UM

Python for Everybody Specialization

University of Michigan via Coursera

K

Kaggle Certificates

Data analysis and machine learning tracks

Technical Skills

Languages

Python SQL JavaScript

Data & Analytics

DuckDB pandas scikit-learn statsmodels Plotly

Frameworks & Tools

Streamlit React Git Linux Selenium

Methods

OLS / Regression Time Series (ARIMA) Classification Backtesting

Overview

Resume

Founder & CEO, Explo Holdings

Jan 2026 – Present

Multi-strategy holding company: investment management (Explo Capital) and real estate development (Explo Properties). Built an equity research platform. Managing ~$800K across the fund and personal portfolio.

Investment Associate, Vance Wealth

Mar 2025 – Nov 2025

Trading operations for ~$700M book. Built direct indexing exclusion model (72bps alpha). Automated 401(k) fund research pipeline. Equity research, tax loss harvesting, alternative investment due diligence.

B.A. Economics, CSUN

2020 – 2024

GPA 3.7, Finance minor, Certificate of Excellence. V.P. of Python Coding in Economics Club. Coursework in econometrics, business analytics, quantitative methods, and risk management.

Download Full Resume (PDF)

Get in Touch

Contact

I am always open to conversations about economics, investing, or potential collaborations. Feel free to reach out through any of the channels below.

Email

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in/pezpher

GitHub

pezpher