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Cliff Asness: A Professional Biography for Investment Practitioners

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  Clifford S. Asness, whose official AQR title is "Managing and Founding Principal" (his AQR biography also describes him as a Founder, Managing Principal and Chief Investment Officer), is the investor most responsible for turning academic factor research (value, momentum, carry, defensive) into a large, diversified, institutional-scale business, and his career is above all a case study in surviving the long drawdowns that such strategies inevitably produce. The single most important lesson from Asness's career is that a diversified, evidence-based systematic process is only as valuable as the organization's ability to hold it through multi-year underperformance, and that the binding constraint is usually client behavior rather than the model. Asness told Institutional Investor in September 2024 that "performance accounted for one third of AQR's 50 percent asset decline" during the quant winter, with the rest due to outflows, "most notably from re...
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Under the Ash of the Boulevards: How Economic Anger and Political Deadlock Ignite Paris

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The acrid tang of tear gas hung low across the boulevards radiating from the Place de la République, clinging to the damp autumn air long after the roar of the crowds had receded into the distant wail of emergency sirens. Across central Paris, shopkeepers swept shattered storefront glass from the pavement, municipal workers surveyed charred barricades erected from overturned rubbish bins and rental bicycles, and police cordons remained tensely stationed along major transit arteries. The French capital has witnessed countless political confrontations throughout its history, yet the violent unrest that erupted over the weekend represents something far more systemic than a spontaneous clash between street radicals and riot police. It is the acute physical symptom of an institutional deadlock that has paralyzed the Fifth Republic, laying bare a compounding crisis of living costs, legislative fragmentation, and a deeply fractured social contract. The immediate trigger for the massive demons...
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