Andrew Ang

Andrew Ang received his PhD from the Anderson School at UCLA and taught finance at Columbia Business School for many years, where he held the Ann F. Kaplan Professorship in Business. He joined BlackRock in 2015 as Managing Director and Head of Factor Investing Strategies within the BlackRock Investment Institute. His textbook "Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing" (Oxford University Press, 2014) is one of the most comprehensive and rigorous academic treatments of factor investing available, covering equity factors, fixed-income factors, inflation, liquidity, and the macroeconomic foundations of risk premia in a unified framework. The book is widely assigned in graduate finance programmes at leading business schools globally. Ang's academic research has contributed significantly to understanding the low-risk anomaly — the empirical finding that low-volatility and low-beta stocks outperform on a risk-adjusted basis — and the term structure of risk premia across asset classes. He has also done important work on the implications of demographics and lifecycle investing for asset allocation. At BlackRock, his work has focused on implementing factor-based strategies at institutional scale for pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other large investors. His ability to bridge rigorous academic research and practical implementation has made him one of the most effective communicators of factor investing principles to institutional audiences.