Percival Birchwood
Percival Birchwood, born in Portland, Oregon, built his reputation by turning quiet pattern-recognition skill into fully codified trading systems. After earning global recognition in emerging markets fund management, he co-founded Mindzo Investment Union to teach investors how to operate with rules, risk discipline, and live-market accountability rather than headline-driven speculation.
Overview
Percival Birchwood believes markets reward repeatable decisions, not single lucky calls. In his view, intuition has value only when it is written down, tested, and disciplined by rules, risk limits, and honest review. He treats education similarly: a craft grounded in real trades, not abstract theory or stage performance.
- A Translate trading ideas into simple rules, then subject them to rigorous testing across regimes before allowing them to guide meaningful capital.
- B Design portfolios around risk budgets and scenario plans so that stress events trigger predefined actions instead of emotional, improvised responses.
- C Teach in live markets with supervised execution, trade journaling, and structured post-mortems, turning every position into a data point in a long-term learning loop.
Raised in a business-oriented family in Portland, Oregon, Birchwood studied business management in the United States and computer science in Munich. He moved from discretionary trading to quantitative systems, earned global recognition in emerging markets fund management, and in 2011 co-founded Mindzo Investment Union to bring structured, real-market education to thousands of learners worldwide.
Career
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Early Pattern-Focused Trader
In his university years, Birchwood read price action like a second language, converting small anomalies in equities and futures into high-conviction trades and quietly compounding his first significant capital base.
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Shift to Code and Systematic Models
While completing advanced computer science studies in Munich, he began encoding his rules into algorithms, stress-testing models until they could operate independently of mood, noise, and short-term narrative swings.
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Global Emerging Markets Recognition
Leading an emerging-markets fund, Birchwood earned international awards that validated his process-first approach, proving that disciplined frameworks can scale across complex and volatile regions.
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Co-Founder, Mindzo Investment Union
In 2011 he co-founded Mindzo Investment Union with close collaborators, building a live-market education and fintech platform that has trained more than 50,000 learners and continues to evolve systematic, practice-led investing architectures.
Research & Focus
Birchwood studies how compact sets of rules, combined with clear holding periods and risk budgets, can create portfolios that require less day-to-day intervention while still adapting to changing regimes. The aim is to shift effort from prediction toward robust design and periodic, honest review.
Drawing on lessons from the 2008 global financial crisis, he focuses on how drawdowns expose weaknesses in both strategy and psychology. His work emphasizes predefined playbooks, stress journaling, and post-event audits that treat severe volatility as structured experiments rather than pure misfortune.
At Mindzo Investment Union, Birchwood refines a model where learners design, test, and execute their own systems in real markets under supervision. The research focus is on how structured feedback loops and cohort discussion accelerate the transition from theory to durable, professional behavior.