About
L.A. Molina comes from physics — a training that treats the world as a dynamical system to be modeled, measured, and questioned. He carried that lens into markets and never put it down.
Over three decades he has worked across the full stack of market risk: trading, managing risk for portfolios with real exposure, and engineering the systems that measure it. His path runs through energy futures — crude, natural gas, refined products — and the options markets that hedge them, including time inside a refining company, where commodity exposure isn't theoretical.
He has also built the machinery from scratch: a real-time desktop trading and risk application for macOS and Windows that values a portfolio across futures, stocks, and options tick-by-tick, computing VaR, CVaR, and stress scenarios as the market moves — not in an overnight batch.
ScalarPhase is where that experience goes to work for others: advisory for firms with exposure, systems for teams that need real measurement, and education for anyone who wants markets taught properly — from first principles.
Operating principles
No framework survives contact with an unmeasured exposure. The first job is always honest measurement — positions, Greeks, tails — before any opinion about what to do.
Most risk failures aren't math failures. They're failures to look at the tails honestly — and to build systems that force you to keep looking.
Advice that can't be implemented is entertainment. Engagements favor working systems and concrete procedures over slide decks.