Thomas Look

What I do

I run an investment operation with a publishing arm. The order matters: capital deployment comes first, research and publication follow. Every framework on this site was developed to solve a real allocation problem in my own portfolios before it became a published product.

My primary focus is the AI infrastructure buildout — the physical supply chain from lithography machines to data-center cooling that makes artificial intelligence possible. I believe this is the largest capital cycle in technology history, and that most investors are navigating it with frameworks designed for a different era.

Proprietary frameworks

• Weekly Signal — 9-dimension market regime scoring (0-100 composite) covering BTC, NDX, SMH, Gold, TLT, and FTSE Global ex-US
• ABR Framework — Agent Beneficiary Ratio: 5-dimension scoring for AI disruption impact on public companies
• Functional Indices — proprietary indices tracking the semiconductor and AI supply chain across 6 layers and 18 sectors
• Euro-AI Sovereign 50 — Europe’s irreplaceable position in the global AI supply chain, mapped across 50 companies in 13 countries
• Software-Credit Nexus — the systemic risk pathway from PE software concentration to private credit crisis

Across platforms

Closelooknet is one part of a broader ecosystem. I also operate:

Background — three decades at the intersection of AI, the financial publishing and capital markets industries, and disruptive tech

Closelooknet is the current intersection of three threads that have run through my work for over thirty years: applying AI and adaptive computational methods to the financial publishing and capital markets industries, building disruptive digital tech as an entrepreneur, and the discipline of capital allocation that sits between them.

1990s — AI in financial markets

I began applying AI to the financial publishing and capital markets industries in the early 1990s, when most of the field still treated neural networks as an academic curiosity. My early work cooperated with the Neuroforecasting Centre at the London Business School, one of the first European programmes systematically applying adaptive computational methods to financial forecasting.

My chapter “AI in Stock Market Forecasting and Trading” appeared in Rapid Application Generation of Business and Finance Software (Kluwer Academic Publishers, edited by Sukhdev Khebbal & Chris Sharpington, March 1996). The chapter argued that adaptive computational methods could outperform the orthodox toolkit precisely because the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Random Walk Approach were inappropriate descriptions of how financial markets actually move — a view that thirty years later still drives the Closelooknet frameworks.

1998–2003 — live streaming and the German Bundesliga

Between 1998 and 2003 I built breakthrough digital infrastructure for the German Bundesliga, at a time when broadband was still scarce and most live-video work was proof-of-concept:

• Pioneered the live streaming of German Bundesliga soccer matches on bundesliga.de — among the earliest live-video infrastructure deployments in European sports.
• Developed and managed the exclusive digital live audio rights for the German Bundesliga, distributed via radio, internet and mobile services and reaching millions of fans.
• Spearheaded the design and production of the official website of the German Football League (bundesliga.de) plus roughly one-third of Bundesliga club websites — defining the visual and product template for the league’s online presence during its formative digital years.

2004–2023 — news agency, consulting, ligalive.net

From 2004 to 2007 I was Head of Sales and New Media at ddp, the second-largest news agency in Germany. From 2007 I built and ran my own consulting business focused on M&A advisory and non-dilutive funding. From 2017 to 2023 I built and then sold ligalive.net, an editorial soccer outlet — a return to the digital-media domain of the late 1990s, this time under my own ownership. A brief pause in 2024 closed with a return to the financial publishing and capital markets industries and the founding of Closelooknet.

Today — Closelooknet and Akte Bundesliga

Managing Director of Closelook Venture GmbH, based in Teltow near Berlin. Co-author of the Akte Bundesliga book series — 22 club dossiers published as a network of analytics websites that connect back to the 1998–2003 digital-media work.

The editorial focus of the Akte Bundesliga series is soccernomics — reading football clubs through the same lens equity markets use for listed companies (ownership and capital structure, revenue durability, management quality, squad-as- portfolio, scandal and governance risk) and treating each club dossier as investable intelligence rather than fan commentary. The series pairs this with prediction markets as a live signal layer — the Akte Bundesliga Predictions portal runs community forecasts, Brier-scored and benchmarked against Pinnacle, with a three-tier model powered by Altus Alpha and Polymarket as a peer signal — so market-implied probabilities for sporting and corporate outcomes sit next to the historical- narrative reads. Tagline across the network: Live-Infos für professionelles Portfolio-Management, Trading und Predictions.

My investment approach combines structural analysis of technology supply chains with quantitative regime detection and Elliott Wave technical analysis. I publish under the principle of full transparency: every position, every signal, every mistake is documented.