Primary Job Title Founder Primary Organization 
Pragmatic Capitalism
Location San Diego, California, United States Regions Greater San Diego Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male
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Mr. Roche is the Founder of Orcam Financial Group, LLC a financial services firm offering fee only financial advisory services. The company was founded to provide investors with an alternative to the profit-first, client-second business model that has come to dominate much of Wall Street these days. Orcam was founded with the idea that financial
services firms can better serve public purpose and Orcam’s goal is to offer products and services that help create better informed and more independent investors, consumers and producers.
Cullen has over a decade of experience in the financial services industry working with some of the biggest firms in finance as well as founding his own firms. crochePrior to establishing Orcam Mr. Roche founded his own investment partnership in 2005 after working at Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management where he worked on a team overseeing $500MM+ in assets under management. Unhappy with the large brokerage firm business model, Mr. Roche formed his own private investment partnership with a substantial personal investment at the age of 25. Over the next 7 years he was able to guide the small business to high risk adjusted returns with no negative full year returns during one of the most turbulent periods in stock market history.
Mr. Roche’s primary areas of expertise include global macro portfolio construction, quantitative risk management, behavioral finance and monetary theory (Cullen is proud not to be considered a technical “economist“). He is the author of the popular book “Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Money and Finance” as well as “Understanding the Modern Monetary System”, one of the top 10 all-time most downloaded research papers on the SSRN network. He is the long-time #1 economics writer on the popular financial website Seeking Alpha, was named one of the “Top Wall Street Economists, Experts and Opinion Leaders” of 2011 by Wall Street Economists and was named one of the “101 Best Finance People” by Business Insider where he was described as “one of the most influential economic thinkers today.” In 2015 Mr. Roche was named one of the “40 Under 40” most influential people in finance by InvestmentNews. He is regularly cited in the Wall Street Journal, on CNBC and in the Financial Times.
Mr. Roche is a Georgetown University alumnus, growing up in the DC area and now living in San Diego, California with his wife Erica and their problem child, Cal, an Australian Shepherd and their flock of laying hens. Cullen is an avid traveler and loves to experience and learn about new cultures. When he’s not pretending to care only about finance Cullen is always outdoors. He’s completed the 140 mile IRONMAN triathlon, surfs badly, runs slowly, fishes badly, loves gardening, raises chickens and tries not to take himself too seriously.
