About & Resources

I'm Nick Kinney — a health actuary working in employer stop-loss insurance, with a particular focus on captive insurance structures. I'm currently an ASA (Associate of the Society of Actuaries) candidate, having completed all requirements including the Financial Analysis and professionalism modules. I expect to receive the designation in June or July 2026. The personal brand, "The Astigmatic Actuary," is a placeholder: the ASA designation is pending, and the astigmatism is permanent.

What I Build

My day job lives in the world of loss ratios, carrier profiling, and employer stop-loss market research. I build interactive dashboards that help people see patterns in claims data — the kind of tools that turn a wall of numbers into something you can actually reason about. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to present actuarial information in ways that are honest, clear, and useful to people who aren't actuaries.

Outside of insurance, I've been building AI agent systems for personal productivity, orchestrating Claude, Gemini, Grok, and other models into autonomous workflows. I've built automated data pipelines that turn GitHub repositories into Notion dashboards. Docker, shell scripts, REST APIs: if it connects two things that weren't connected before, I'm probably interested.

What I Think About

The intersection of actuarial science and artificial intelligence is where most of my thinking lives these days. Machine learning is starting to change how we price insurance and set reserves, and I find the questions it raises genuinely fascinating — not just technically, but philosophically. What does it mean when a model can predict claims better than a human but can't explain why? How do you validate something you can't fully interpret? These aren't abstract questions when you're the one signing the reserve opinion.

I'm also drawn to complex systems more broadly — the kind where the wiring is the behavior. I've written on this blog about fruit fly connectomes, interstellar debt economics, and the feedback loops that drive insurance cycles, and somehow all three feel like they're about the same thing. I'm a devoted viewer of 3Blue1Brown — Grant Sanderson's videos have shaped how I think about building visual intuition for deep mathematics, and they've directly inspired at least one post on this blog.

On the investing side, I'm a committed Boglehead. I believe in the three-fund portfolio, the virtue of low fees, and the discipline of doing nothing for decades at a time. I wrote a whole essay about it if you're curious. And I'm still grinding through the Society of Actuaries exam track — a process that teaches you as much about persistence as it does about probability.

I sleep well. Optimism is a healthy mental framework for just about everything. Except claims.

Get in Touch

I love hearing from people who read this blog — especially if you think I'm wrong about something. The best conversations start with disagreement. You can reach me by email, find me on LinkedIn, or check out what I'm building on GitHub.