Richard Olsen has combined academic research with hands on experience in financial markets. He founded Olsen & Associates in 1985, which developed and marketed a real time information system with forecasts and trading recommendations for financial markets, co-founder of OANDA, a successful internet market maker, and Olsen Ltd, a hedge fund. Richard is a pioneer of high frequency finance and has co- authored the book Introduction to High Frequency Finance, published at Academic Press in 2001. Together with a team of researchers he has recently discovered 12 new scaling laws of the foreign exchange markets continuing work on scaling laws that was first started in 1989. He is visiting professor at the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents at the University of Essex.