Money Ex Machina is an independent, pseudonymous project to design and operate a personal trading system from first principles: documented in public, grounded in institutional experience, and driven by philosophical intent.
All content is copyright the author, operating under the pseudonym Dr Pendryl Coinwright. Content is freely readable and shareable for personal or educational use, but commercial or institutional reuse requires explicit permission. For more, see the legal and licence pages.
For more on what this project is doing and why, see the welcome post or read the full manifesto.
About me
This project is authored by someone who is a trained scientist, who has spent a decade inside finance: working across analysis, model-building, strategy construction, trading processes and system design at the highest levels of the industry. Most recently, I spent almost six years at a major hedge fund, where I helped design and operate institutional-scale trading systems.
After fulfilling my contractual obligations, I chose to step away—not out of disillusionment, but out of conviction. I have seen what works, what does not and what remains unexamined in how we build and use financial infrastructure. Money Ex Machina is where I explore what can be done differently.
I am not publishing under my full personal identity. That is not because I am hiding, but because I believe digital citizenship includes the right to privacy, security, and role separation. This is not a personality brand. It is a project. And like any well-designed system, it deserves to be modular: who I am privately is distinct from what I am building here. For more on pseudonym usage, see the Use of Pseudonym section in the legal page.
There is no lifestyle content here. No personal revelations. Just tools, thoughts, designs, and arguments about how we might reclaim financial infrastructure as individuals, and build coherent systems from the ground up.
If the work resonates, great. If you want to engage, even better. But the content should stand on its own, without appeal to biography.
On the Names
"Money ex Machina" is the project.
"Money Machine" is the personal trading and investing system I am building.
"Dr Pendryl Coinwright" is the person - a constructed identity for a serious but self-aware thinker working in public.
The pseudonym preserves personal privacy while maintaining accountability. Everything here is real - except the name.
Why “Money ex Machina”?
The name is a deliberate reference to Deus ex machina—“god from the machine”—a theatrical device where a divine force descends from the sky to resolve a complex story.
Money ex Machina flips that idea on its head.
There’s no divine rescue here. No external savior. Just a system: carefully designed, tested, and operated by one person. The machine does not resolve the plot - it is the plot. And the money does not arrive from outside - it emerges through process, coherence, and principled design.
This project is about reclaiming agency. About building tools that clarify rather than mystify. About designing systems where financial outcomes are earned, not bestowed. The name is a reminder: no one is coming. But if we build well, that may be enough.
The logo
The Money-ex-Machina logo is reminiscent of a decision tree: with the important square decision node in the top-left corner of a four part separated pane, in blood-red, two uncertainty / randomness nodes, represented as customary circles, in the top right and bottom-left field, as well as a result / outcome node in the bottom-right field, represented by a triangle. In its' totality this arrangement symbolises the flow of a decision process under uncertainty. The elements are connected by a solid, black framework made up of a cross shape and circles surrounding the uncertainty nodes, which does both, connecting the decision to the outcome and framing the uncertainty nodes, bringing them under control. This represents our construction of a system that turns decision making under uncertainty (and ambiguity) into a manageable, precise, and accurate process. The individual elements are in strict proportions to one another:
- The bar-width of the connecting framework is 1/12th of the width of the decision node, symbolising us running the framework every month of the year, ever day of the month etc.
- The uncertainty nodes have the same diameter as the width of the decision node, symbolizing our decisions being sized appropriately to the uncertainties and risk involved.
- The width of the framing around the uncertainty nodes is similarly 1/12 of the diameter, as is the distance of all elements from an outer encompassing circle.
- The distance from the center of the logo to the outer points at the bottom and right of the result triangle are identical to the distance across the decision node towards the outer circle. Firstly this creates a return triangle, bigger by area than the decision node, demonstrating us creating outsized returns, but of course again in strict proportions to both the decisions taken and the risk managed, emphasising the systematic nature of our strategies.