Cliff Asness
The Disruptor
Contrarian and drawn to the edge; challenges the settled answer.
Cliff Asness, AQR Capital Management co-founder and CIO, wears The Disruptor honestly. His career-defining move was transplanting academic factor models across entirely new asset classes, treating countries as tradable stocks before practitioners had systematised the idea. Yet his insistence on out-of-sample validation is what separates bold thinking from recklessness. His sustained public critique of private equity valuation smoothing proves he still challenges comfortable consensus, including within his own industry.
“We spent about three days before we hit on the obvious solution, which was to pretend countries were individual stocks and treat them like what we had studied in academia — value, momentum, even size.”
“When you go to a new market you haven't looked at yet and it holds up, you go, maybe we're actually onto something here. Out-of-sample tests are kind of the gold standard.”
“I think more and more people do private equity today because they don't have to show volatility, not for the opportunity. Those chickens may come home to roost at some point.”
Masters in Business: “Cliff Asness on Celebrating 25 Years With AQR”
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