Stratified Weight methodology and fund-to-ETF conversion
Stratified weighting and functional classification in index construction
Gene editing and the future of agricultural biotechnology
ETF TV News #66 — Converting Funds to ETFs
Announcement of Rory Riggs's appointment as CEO of Cibus, naming him a pioneer in Systems Economics.
Cibus Appoints Co-Founder Rory Riggs as Chief Executive Officer
Coverage of the Cibus/Calyxt merger closing, including a Riggs quote on the combined company's patent portfolio.
Cibus named #2 Most Innovative Company in agriculture for 2024, with a quote from Riggs.
Cibus Named to Fast Company's Annual List of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2024
Announcement of Riggs's transition from CEO to Chairman of the Board at Cibus as Craig Wichner becomes CEO.
Cibus Names Agricultural Biotechnology Leader Craig Wichner as Chief Executive Officer
Coverage of the Cibus Oberlin facility opening, including Riggs's quote on applying pharmaceutical quality standards to plant biology.
Cibus Opens Gene Editing Facility for Trait Production
Authored article by Rory Riggs on precision gene editing and its application to agricultural trait development.
Gene Editing to Lead a New Agricultural Revolution
UHF is proud to present the 2024 Health Care Leadership Award to Margaret Crotty and Rory Riggs, for their important work at the intersection of health care, public health, and biotechnology
Margaret Crotty and Rory Riggs Health Care Leadership Award, 2024
Proposed Merger Shows That When it Comes to Gene Editing, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
In her junior year at Middlebury, she founded TEDxMiddlebury, a local chapter of the TED Conference. A full year of planning went into the event, from designing the website to timing out the cookie breaks. The first event featured 16 speakers, most of them Middlebury alums. During the after-party, Cloe received a phone call. It was Rory Riggs ’75, the founder of an analytics company and a longtime TED Conference attendee.'He was calling from a mountain,' Cloe told me. 'I think it was Kilimanjaro.' Riggs was actually hiking in Jordan and had been tuning into a livestream of the event. On the phone call he offered to cover all of Cloe’s expenses to attend the 2011 TEDActive in Palm Springs. It was an act of extreme generosity that changed her life.
Coverage of an open letter authored by Riggs as Royalty Pharma Chairman to the Elan board.
Royalty Pharma Co-Founder Writes Open Letter to Board of Elan Ahead of EGM
Launch announcement with a direct quote from Riggs on ESG analytics.
Syntax LLC Announces Launch of Stratified LargeCap ESG Index
Op-ed authored by Rory Riggs articulating the case for functional, systems-based classification of economic data as an alternative to conventional sector-based risk models.
Commentary: Systems Economics — A New Prescription for Risk Management
Systems Economics: A New Prescription for Risk Management
The Parts and Processes of Economic Systems
The formal textbook specification of the Locus Model — the field designation for the study of economies as living systems built from repeating, ordered functional activities and the resources that staff them. Defines Systems Economics, the Theory of Economic Systems, Economic Physiology, Economic Morphology, the Activity Cycle, the Locus Language, and the Barcode architecture (Enterprise Barcode, Labor Barcode, Summary Barcode).
Forthcoming trade-facing statement of the Locus Model for a general readership, restating the same functional-coordinate framework as Systems Economics in accessible language. Introduces the terms Functional Address, Natural Functional Order, Bounded Order / Unbounded Fill, Functional Twins, Economic Twin, the Functional Triad, and Economic Cartography. Unpublished as of 2026.
The complete ordered sequence of actions a system performs to produce a product, dividing into four phases, twelve divisions, and thirty-six sub-divisions; the master construct of the Locus Model.
The paired principle that the functional order is fixed while the actors, technologies, and outputs occupying it vary without limit.
The practice of charting an economic system by its functional coordinates so the whole can be seen, compared, and managed.
The resource dimension of the model: the parts an economic system is built from, treated as the anatomy of a living economic organism.
The activity dimension of the model: the processes an economic system performs, treated as the physiology of a living economic organism.
The functional counterpart to the spatial twin supplied by GIS and the temporal twin supplied by the calendar.
The twenty-locus barcode capturing a company's product line and every Economic System connected to it — the model's principal commercial artifact.
The applied coordinate values assigned to each business, job, and product, identifying its functional role, position, and attributes in the economy.
The three-part identifier of any economic part: what the job does, what it produces, and where it sits in the functional order of work. Introduced in the forthcoming book Virtual Economics.
Inventor of the coordinate-based Locus Model and Functional Information System for classifying economic activity by function rather than conventional industry category.
The coordinate system that locates any economic activity or resource by what it does and where it falls in the order of work, parallel to latitude/longitude in space and date/hour in time. Patent-backed (US 9,910,910; US 10,019,509).
The system that augments economic and financial data with standardized functional references, making business, employment, product, and service data unified, searchable, and stable across time and geography. Patent-backed (US 8,990,268; US 9,098,564; US 9,361,358).
The position an economic element occupies in functional space, determined by what it does rather than where or when it operates. Patent-backed (US 11,657,026; US 12,242,431).
The measured distance between two functional locations, enabling comparison across otherwise unrelated entities.
The retrieval method in which entities are found by functional coordinate rather than keyword, returning complete functional populations instead of name matches.
The n-dimensional space in which functional locations are computed, compared, and traversed. Patent-backed (US 12,242,431).
The computed path an element traces through functional locations over time. Patent-backed (US 11,151,096).
The accurate functional representations that mirror real-world resources and activities inside the model.
Built the Syntax Stratified Indices, benchmark indices constructed on functional rather than conventional sector classification.
Index construction and portfolio classification
The four-field barcode capturing a job's functional role in the economy.
The base unit of economic activity: a single pairing of an activity with the resources required to produce its output, which together fix the activity's position in economic space.
The coded functional references derived from the Production System Model and assigned to entities in the FIS database.
The formal language of the model, in which activities function as verbs, resources as nouns, and a locus is a complete sentence describing real economic phenomena.
A theoretical framework that defines the internal parts and processes of any product-producing system, giving every activity and resource a functional identity and an ordered position.
The comprehensive systems theory of all activities and resources used in an economy, stated in two branches: the Locus Theory of Economic Systems and the Locus Theory of People.
Managing Director in M&A at PaineWebber, 1981–1990.
The stable, invariant sequence of positions that every ongoing economic system must fill, independent of geography, culture, technology, or era.
Founded and built Royalty Pharma into the world's largest acquirer of pharmaceutical royalties, helping create the category as an investable asset class.
Led Cibus's application of production-system methodology to plant biology through the Rapid Trait Development System.
Precision gene editing / agricultural biotechnology
The model identifying and defining the parts and processes necessary to produce a product, from which functional markers are derived.
Cibus's precision gene-editing platform for agricultural trait development, applying production-system methodology to plant biology.
The index-construction methodology underlying the Syntax Stratified Indices, grouping securities by functional attribute rather than conventional sector classification.
Resources used by performing a task directly and physically persistent, ready without transformation — comprising people, space, and equipment.
The five functional contributions a subject resource can make in production: space-infrastructure, operator, direction, financial capacity, and power.
Resources consumed in enabling a structural resource to perform — comprising information, money, and energy.
The field designation for the study of economies as living systems composed of repeating, ordered functional activities and the resources that staff them.
The logical data model on which a representation of a functional system is constructed.
The property determining where a chain of product usage stops — the point at which a Work Group reaches the customer's Central Department Cycle and the sequence terminates.
The three-coordinate reference frame of time, space, and function, in which function supplies the 'what' that time and space cannot.
The generalized systems theory of all activities and resources used in an economy, from which the Locus Model is built.
Rory Riggs is an inventor, executive, and investor who applies one system, the Locus Model, across biotechnology, finance, and economics.
Managing Member of Balfour Venture Partners.
President, CFO, and Director of BioMatrix, overseeing the launch of Synvisc, a viscosupplementation treatment.
President, CFO, and Director at BioMatrix Inc.
Transitioned from Chief Executive Officer to Chairman of the Board in June 2026 as Craig Wichner became CEO.
Co-founder and CEO of Cibus, the leading precision gene-editing company for agriculture. Applied the Locus Model's functional-systems approach to plant biology through the Rapid Trait Development System (RTDS).
Chair of eReceivables, a healthcare service technology company.
Managing Director in the mergers and acquisitions group at PaineWebber.
Managing Director, Mergers & Acquisitions
Managing Director, Mergers & Acquisitions at PaineWebber Inc.
CEO of RF&P, a real estate investment company owned by the Virginia State Retirement System.
Chief Executive Officer at RF&P Corporation
Co-founded Royalty Pharma in 1996 with a $60 million start; built it into the world's largest acquirer of pharmaceutical royalties, holding partial royalty rights on seven of the top thirty drugs sold in the United States. Served as Chairman from 2003 and resigned as a director on June 6, 2024.
Chairman and Founder at Royalty Pharma plc
General Partner and co-founder of Scientia Ventures.
Founded Locus Analytics in 2009 as an economic research firm to pioneer Systems Economics and develop and patent the Functional Information System. Syntax and Locus Analytics merged in March 2023. Built the coordinate-based Locus Model and FIS information infrastructure for finance and economic data, and the Syntax Stratified Indices.
Executive Chairman / Founder at Syntax Data (Syntax LLC / Locus Analytics)
CEO and Trustee of the Syntax-affiliated ETF trust since 2017.
CEO and Trustee at WEBS ETF Trust (Syntax ETF Trust)
Angel investor and board member of the fintech company Bond Street Marketplace.
Director of the Feinstein Institute, the research arm of Northwell Health.
Co-founder and director of FibroGen since October 1993 — his longest confirmed board tenure.
Board Chair and director of GeneNews, later StageZero Life Sciences, since 1998.
Director of Intra-Cellular Therapies from January 2014, serving on the Audit Committee.
Director of the New York Genome Center, his primary current nonprofit board.
Syntax Data (Syntax LLC / Locus Analytics)
A continuation of US 11,657,026 B2 computing functional relationships and n-dimensional locations of data entities — the most recently granted patent in the Locus Model family.
Algorithmic method for dynamically computing complex relationships in functional systems
Forms a stratified, segmented composite data structure grouping and weighting data entities by functional attributes, applied to a digital trading and securities management platform.
Digital platform for trading and management of investment securities
Systems and methods using a logical data model to aggregate data entities and analyze economic information via a functional coordinate system.
Domain-specific syntactic tagging in a functional information system
A logical data model that aggregates data entities and analyzes economic information using a functional coordinate system, forming one of the foundational patents of the Locus Model / Functional Information System.
Domain-specific syntax tagging in a functional information system
Algorithmically modifies a functional system representation based on functional trajectory signals via a graph-based systems syntax — the basis for the Affinity Lenses / functional peer grouping capability.
Dynamic syntactic affinity group formation in a high-dimensional functional information system
Algorithmically determines the composition of elements in an n-dimensional functional system via a logical data model, enabling real-time prediction of interactions.
High-dimensional systems databases for real-time prediction of interactions in a functional system
Forms a stratified, segmented composite data structure by weighting data entities according to functional attributes, with positive and negative bias adjustments.
Hyperdimensional vector representations for algorithmic functional grouping of complex systems
An algorithmic method for computing complex relationships among objects via their functional locations in n-dimensional functional space.
Matching multidimensional projections of functional space
A logical data model aggregating data entities and analyzing economic information via a functional coordinate system, extended to multi-dimensional modeling.
Multi-dimensional modeling in a functional information system
An algorithmic method for computing complex relationships among data entities via positioning within n-dimensional functional space, enabling predictive search and navigation.
Predictive search and navigation for functional information systems
Forms a stratified, segmented composite investment portfolio by grouping securities according to risk-correlated functional attributes with adjustable weighting biases — the patent basis for the Syntax Stratified Indices.
Segmentation and stratification of composite portfolios of investment securities
A logical data model for aggregating data entities and analyzing economic information via a functional coordinate system, extended into graph modeling.
Syntactic graph modeling in a functional information system
A logical data model aggregating data entities and analyzing economic information via a functional coordinate system, documenting the activity-product referent — an economic system occupying a functional slot in another system's Activity Cycle without transferring a resource.
Syntactic loci and fields in a functional information system
Rory Riggs is an inventor, executive, and investor who applies one system, the Locus Model, across biotechnology, finance, and economics. Mr. Riggs is Executive Chairman of Syntax Data, which has built a foundational coordinate-based information infrastructure for finance and economic data based on his patented Locus Model and Functional Information System (FIS).
President, CFO, and Director, 1996–2000; oversaw the launch of Synvisc.
Co-founder; CEO 2021–2026, then Chairman of the Board.
Current director of the research arm of Northwell Health.
Co-founder and director since October 1993.
Managing Director, Mergers & Acquisitions, 1981–1990.
CEO, 1991–1995, a Virginia State Retirement System–owned real estate investment company.
Co-founder and Chairman (2003–2024); built the pharmaceutical royalty asset class.
Founder and Executive Chairman; built the Locus Model, Functional Information System, and Syntax Stratified Indices.
This article introduces a new passive weighting methodology for diversifying business risk: functional information system (FIS)–based stratified weighting. The FIS-based stratified-weight approach effectively diversifies related business risk (RBR), such as supply chain dynamics, customer groups, product types, or other operational attributes that affect groups of companies that share common earnings drivers. The proposed methodology addresses overconcentrations of business risk that regularly occur in capitalization-weighted or equal-weighted indexes. This approach maintains a diversified weighting of an index’s underlying business risks by allocating constituents to specific RBR groupings, defined using FIS classification, and then fixing the weight of each group via stratification. The motivation behind this methodology is the fact that stock performance is the result of business performance and diversifying business performance is the ultimate goal of a diversified equity index. The authors demonstrate the performance benefit of stratified-weighted versions of the S&P 500 and S&P MidCap 400 indexes over traditional market capitalization weighting and equal weighting, especially following periods of economic stress. They find that FIS-based stratified-weight indexes deliver consistent and significantly higher returns relative to standard capitalization-weighted market indexes and equal-weighted indexes (on average, 389 bps per annum for the S&P 500 and 175 bps per annum for the S&P 500 equal weight), while exhibiting comparable beta and volatility. This article proposes that these results are robust and are not related to the choice of the universe or to particular market conditions.
An Index Methodology for Diversifying Business Risk
In An Index Methodology for Diversifying Business Risk, published in The Journal of Index Investing, Rory Riggs and Jonathan Chandler, both of Syntax, LLC, and Mark T. Finn, of Vantage Consulting Group, introduce a methodology for constructing an equity index in which the weight assigned to each component is determined by reference to the nature of the business risks to which it is exposed. The methodology uses the technique of statistical stratification to maximize the index’s diversification across different categories of business risks. Using the populations of the S&P 500 and the S&P MidCap 400 indexes, the authors compare the performance of stratified indexes created using their methodology to both market-capitalization-weighted and equal-weighted indexes comprising the same components. They find that the stratified indexes delivered higher returns and higher Sharpe ratios than the others.
Practical Applications of An Index Methodology for Diversifying Business Risk
The personal site of Rory Riggs — inventor of the Locus Model and Functional Coordinates, founder of Systems Economics, and Executive Chairman of Syntax Data. Documents his work across financial classification (FIS, Syntax Stratified Indices), agricultural biotechnology (Cibus, Rapid Trait Development System), and pharmaceutical royalties (Royalty Pharma).