Hedge Fund - AQR Capital Management

Cliff Asness is a guru in the financial world. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with dual degrees in Economics and Engineering, Cliff Asness earned his MBA and ultimately his PhD in Finance from the University of Chicago. During his studies, Cliff Asness worked as research assistant to Eugene Fama, the popular theorist in efficient markets. For his dissertation, Asness studied the use of fundamental analysis to assess the true value of a stock. He found that it was possible to beat the market, consistently, by exploiting value and momentum. The idea was not a new one but Cliff Asness was the first to develop empirical evidence to that fact. He has since gone on to win a variety of awards for academic research and his articles explaining the same.

Cliff Asness went on to work at Goldman Sachs where he was a Managing Director and Director of Quantitative Research for the Asset Management Division, before he co-founded AQR Capital Management in 1997 with David Kabiller, Robert Krail and John Liew, amongst several other colleagues.

Cliff Asness et al started AQR Capital Management to build upon the success they had enjoyed at Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM), while enabling key professionals to spend more time in research and developing investment products. Cliff Asness uses many of the concepts he is famous for in the running of AQR Capital Management. He combining both traditional (managed relative to a benchmark) and non-traditional (managed seeking absolute returns) measures to manage the firm's performance, making decisions AQR's investments span from higher volatility market-neutral hedge funds to lower volatility benchmark-driven traditional products.

AQR Capital Management was hit hard by the financial crisis, losing more than 50 percent in 2007 and 2008. Firmwide assets fell from $39.1 billion in September 2007 to $17.2 billion in March 2009 - but Asness saw it through the storm. AQR rose 38 percent in 2009 and over 27 percent in 2010. In 2011, AQR Capital Management's returns slumped to just under 7 percent - a big difference from 2010, but still better than the average hedge fund, which lost over 4 percent.