Cliff Asness is a co-founder of AQR Capital Management, the quantitative investment firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he is president and a founding and managing principal.
Cliff Asness is a co-founder of AQR Capital Management, the quantitative investment firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he is president and a founding and managing principal.
Asness was born in 1966 in Queens, New York. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 with a double major in electrical engineering and economics, then earned an MBA in 1991 and a PhD in finance in 1994 at the University of Chicago, where Eugene Fama was his dissertation adviser. His dissertation studied momentum, the tendency of stocks with rising prices to keep rising.
He started at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in the early 1990s, running a new quantitative research desk. Models built by his team were used in what became the Goldman Sachs Global Alpha Fund, which had more than $12 billion under management at its height in 2007. In 1998 Asness, David Kabiller, John Liew and Robert Krail left to found AQR; the firm moved its headquarters from New York to Greenwich in 2004.
AQR lost heavily in the 2008 financial crisis, when its assets fell from $39 billion in 2007 to $17 billion, and it had $33 billion under management by the end of 2010. Forbes described it in 2020 as a firm built on factor-based investing, with products ranging from hedge funds to mutual funds. Asness has published widely on value and momentum, including a 2013 Journal of Finance paper with Tobias Moskowitz and Lasse Pedersen, and often criticizes high hedge fund fees.
Sources · written 23 October 2026