David Nakamura, CFA
Investment Analyst
David Nakamura, CFA, helps investors and savers cut through complexity with rigorous, transparent quantitative tools.
David Nakamura is a San Francisco-based Chartered Financial Analyst with fourteen years of experience spanning quantitative portfolio analysis, retirement planning, and institutional asset management. At Redwood Capital Advisors, he leads research on equity and fixed-income strategies for high-net-worth clients, building the projection models and stress-testing frameworks the firm relies on to evaluate long-term portfolio outcomes. His earlier work at Wells Fargo Investment Institute centered on constructing retirement-income glide paths and backtesting withdrawal-rate assumptions against historical market cycles, research that directly informs how practitioners evaluate savings adequacy.
At OnlyCalculators, David authors and reviews tools in the investing and retirement category, including compound interest calculators, traditional and Roth IRA contribution estimators, and 401(k) growth projectors. He brings the same modeling discipline he applies in institutional settings to every calculator he stewards: verifying underlying formulas against authoritative sources such as IRS publications and FINRA guidelines, confirming that edge cases, early withdrawal penalties, catch-up contribution limits, inflation-adjusted return assumptions, are handled correctly rather than silently ignored. His background in financial engineering means he is equally comfortable auditing the mathematics of a present-value calculation and explaining its real-world implications in plain language.
David holds a B.S. in Economics from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Financial Engineering from UCLA. He is a member of CFA Society San Francisco and has spoken at regional events on the practical limits of historical return assumptions in retirement projections. When a calculator under his review contains a simplification that could mislead a user about their financial trajectory, he revises the methodology and updates the explanatory copy, treating accuracy and interpretability as equally non-negotiable.
“Every formula is verified against primary regulatory and academic sources, and every assumption is disclosed explicitly so users can judge whether it applies to their situation.”