Cliff Asness
| Clifford Asness | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 17, 1966 Queens, New York |
| Fields | Financial Economics |
| Institutions |
AQR Capital Management Goldman Sachs |
| Alma mater | B.S. Eng./B.S. Econ.University of Pennsylvania M.B.A. Chicago Booth School of Business PhD University of Chicago Booth School of Business |
| Doctoral advisor | Eugene Fama |
| Notable awards | --2000 Graham and Dodd Excellence Award --2001 Journal of Portfolio Management Best Paper award --2003 Graham and Dodd Award for the Year's Best Paper --2003 Journal of Portfolio Management Best Paper award --2004 Graham and Dodd Award for the Year's Best Shorter Perspectives Piece |
| Spouse | Laurel Elizabeth Fraser |
Clifford Scott "Cliff" Asness (born October 17, 1966) is the co-founder of AQR Capital Management and a financial analyst.
Asness was born to a Jewish family, in Queens, New York, the son of Carol, who ran a medical education firm, and Barry Asness, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. His family moved to Roslyn Heights, New York when he was four. He attended the B'nai B'rith Perlman Camp and graduated from Herricks High School where "(he) wasn’t an academic star". He graduated from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology (M&T) with dual degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Thereafter, he entered the finance PhD program at the University of Chicago and became the research assistant to Eugene Fama, an influential efficient market theorist and empiricist.
Asness' dissertation, in opposition to his mentor, asserted that consistent market-beating profits were attainable by exploiting both value and momentum; in his context, value means using fundamental analysis to assess the true worth of a security and momentum means betting that it will continue to go up or down as it has in the recent past. Neither idea was original with Asness but he was credited with being the first to compile enough empirical evidence across a wide variety of markets to bring the ideas into the academic financial mainstream. Per Asness, the two ideas are supposed to work together. Value investors make money, but may have to wait a very long time for it, with a lot of mark-to-market pain along the way. Momentum investors also make money, but can suffer huge drawdowns when bubbles pop. Buying cheap things after they have already started going up, and selling expensive things after they have already started going down, can be the best of both worlds. However, the strategy for accumulation is subject to the same constraints as any other and systemic effects in markets can invalidate it: AQR and other similar ventures lost massive amounts of wealth in the Financial crisis of 2007-2010 with assets declining from $39 billion in 2007 to $17 billion by the end of 2008.
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