While on the Harvard faculty, Rausser registered as a commodity trading advisor and founded a hedge fund focused on regulated futures and options markets, including basic commodities, fixed-income investments, foreign exchange, energy, lumber, and over-the-counter (OTC) derivative transactions. After leaving his position as senior economist at USAID, Rausser resumed his involvement in both regulated and OTC-traded markets. He has advised exchanges and clearinghouses, developed proprietary risk-management systems, and provided seed capital to start several trading-related businesses. One of these enterprises, Peak6 Investments, has become one of the country’s most successful equity-options trading firms. Rausser and Peak 6 Investments co-founded Opt4 Derivatives, a company that focused on the development of intellectual property to support complex OTC transactions.
Rausser and his colleagues invented a new mechanism for valuing financial contracts; a subsequent patent entitled “Integrated Electronic Exchange of Structured Contracts with Dynamic Risk-Based Transaction Permissioning” was issued in April 2010. The patent covers a proprietary system of ex ante risk control and real-time mark-to-market evaluation of structured financial contracts. It incorporates tools that enable real-time valuation of complex portfolios of option transactions. Rausser has applied this and related methods in order to design and implement decision-support risk analysis and structured financial contracts that separate market risk from credit risk. This effort — along with numerous other publications, as well as consulting work with organized futures markets exchanges in the U.S. and England — formed part of the intellectual foundation for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.
In 1990, Rausser co-founded the Law and Economics Consulting Group (LECG) with three other UC Berkeley professors. LECG was taken public in 1997 on the NYSE and subsequently merged. He was a member of the board of directors until 2000.
In 2000, Rausser was a senior economist consultant at Charles River Associates until 2005.
In 2006, Rausser co-founded OnPoint Analytics, a litigation and business-consulting firm. He currently serves as chairman of the board as well as a consultant. His consulting experience includes issues associated with economic damage determination, economic feasibility studies, antitrust violations, unfair competition, market manipulation, class certification, risk valuation, and statistical and econometric modeling. He has provided expert testimony in matters involving pharmaceutical products, patent infringement and patent infringement damages, commercial success, new product introduction, and damages flowing from delayed entry or anticompetitive barriers to market entry.
He also serves as a board member at OnPoint Analytics Capital Partners, a boutique capital advisory firm.
Rausser is also a board member in Rembrandt Venture Partners, Certant, Werqwise, and LogicSource.