Inspired by his experience with trading Coates' research focuses on the hormonal basis of financial decisionmaking. Coates' experience with market crises, such as Black Monday, the Asian financial crisis and the dot.com bubble, allowed him to observe first hand the powerful emotions driving traders during these tail events. In order to better understanding market sentiment he looked at behavioural economics and ultimately to neuroscience and endocrinology. He returned to Cambridge in 2004 to test a hypothesis he had developed while working at Wall Street: that endogenous steroids were shifting ris preferences systematically across the market cycle, exaggerating the peaks and troughs.