Cliff Asness

Cliff Asness co-founded AQR Capital Management in 1998 after completing his PhD under Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago and working at Goldman Sachs. AQR grew to manage over $200 billion and became one of the defining firms of systematic, factor-based investing. Asness has published extensively on value investing, momentum, the relationship between the two, and the diversification benefits of alternative risk premia. He is known for blunt commentary on markets, investment philosophy debates, and criticism of high-fee active management. His academic contributions alongside his practitioner role are unusually prominent. His work on time-series momentum and the carry trade, and his documentation of the value spread reaching extreme levels during the late 1990s tech bubble and again in the late 2010s, has provided a historically grounded framework for setting realistic return expectations from systematic value strategies over multi-year horizons.