Cliff Asness
Founder & CIO, AQR Capital Management. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutiveauthoracademic@cliffordasness ↗LinkedIn ↗aqr.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Cliff Asness is a pioneer in quantitative and factor-based investing who co-founded AQR Capital Management in 1998 to apply systematic, research-driven strategies like value and momentum across global portfolios. Before launching AQR, he directed quantitative research at Goldman Sachs Asset Management and managed the firm's flagship Global Alpha Fund.
1shows
1appearances
24statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
30said about them ↓ Everything Cliff Asness said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Asness: Social media and ubiquitous data make market inefficiencies longer-lasting
“I think the ubiquity of data, social media, maybe indexing, these things have added up to a market where inefficiencies are bigger and last longer.”
Asness: Multi-manager pod shops probably cannot grow by another 5x
“I tend to think those shops probably can't grow by another factor of five. There's just a limit to alpha. There are limits how many great traders that are out there.”
Asness: Private equity volatility is higher than public markets despite reported metrics
“Where private equity is well to the left of public equity, and it's concentrated off in levered equity. So if that's vol on the x-axis, it is not to the left.”
Asness: Markets are more efficient and harder to beat than active managers think
“Even today, I think the markets are more efficient, I think, probably than the average active manager. I think they're hard to beat.”
Asness: AQR models live factor returns at half the backtested result
“Literally, since our Goldman Sachs days, this is more than 25 years ago, we've generally used half a backtest out of sample as a bogey. And life has worked out fairly close to that.”
Asness: Painful three-year drawdowns protect value factors from being arbitraged away
“The famous value factor, that can kill your world for three years. That's a terrible thing to live through, a wonderful thing if you don't want a factor to be arbitraged away.”
Asness: Unconstrained factor machine learning yields zero out-of-sample power
“If you let it look at every possible factor, it's going to be a giant insane data mining exercise. I believe it'll have zero out of sample power.”
Asness: Machine learning will not help determine the equity risk premium
“I'll give you an example of something ML I don't think will help us on, and maybe I'll be proven wrong about this, but vital numbers to people like us. What is the equity risk premium? What is the premium for high quality against low quality stocks? There, you…”
Asness: Value spreads suggest smart money has also moved to indexing
“Given what we've seen with particularly value strategies and this fact that spreads between cheap and expensive are still considerably wider and recently hit their widest level ever, I don't think there's a lot of evidence that only the dumb money has left and…”
Asness: Expanding multiples drove 85% of US equity outperformance over 30 years
“Shows that U.S. Equities have indeed crushed global equities in the last, call it, 30 years. Don't hold me to the exact numbers, but call it 80, 85% of that victory has been multiples going up. U.S. Started out cheaper and is now considerably more expensive in…”
Asness: Investors Are Too Accepting of Concentration and Overly Frightened of Leverage
“We think people are essentially too accepting of concentration risk and too frightened of leverage risk.”
Asness: University investment committees suffer anti-contrarian bias due to donor selection
“Those on the committee are often some of the biggest donors over the last 10 years. Let's just be honest. The biggest donors are the most successful parts of the financial world over the last 10 years. Therefore, committees tend to be people of goodwill who be…”
Asness: Committees should scrutinize their best-performing managers alongside their worst
“One of the things I do when I'm on a committee, I'll make suggestions like, if we're bringing in our three worst managers, let's bring in our three best, too, because those are anomalous returns also. They're more pleasant to have anomalous big returns, but th…”
Asness: AQR shrank by half and restructured into small research teams
“I think, and this was excruciating and had a human cost, but having to shrink by half made us make very hard decisions about being blunt, who are absolute best commando team researchers, men and women who just excel. We started out this way and we're back to t…”
Asness: Best economic and investing research results are fairly simple
“I think most of the best results in economics and investing in finance are fairly simple. They use tables and maybe linear regression.”
Asness: Grossman-Stiglitz paradox proves markets cannot be perfectly efficient
“Grossman and Stiglitz wrote a paper introducing a paradox about a perfectly efficient market a long time ago that people need to spend a lot of money making something perfectly efficient on research, on time, and why are they going to do that if it's perfectly…”
Asness: Excess investment returns stem from either undiversifiable risk or behavioral errors
“With almost any strategy that we believe produces an excess return, I always say we believe, you never know if you're right, but if you believe it, there are almost always two twin competing explanations. An efficient markets explanation. One that says you sho…”
Asness: Inefficiencies persist because arbitraging residual errors yields poor risk-adjusted returns
“If there's an error people make on average, and people catch on to it, maybe they invest enough dollars to arbitrage half that error away. But then it gets to be a pretty low-risk-adjusted return to do the last half.”
Asness: A prolonged shallow drawdown damages asset managers more than a fast crash
“Duration of pain is as important as intensity of pain to how damaging it is to both your future life expectancy and to your business. A crash that quickly reverses itself. Almost by definition, people are tense. Why'd that crash? You have to talk about it. You…”
Asness: Price-to-book is the value metric most distorted by intangible assets
“Everyone thinks the value is price to book. I blame my heroes, Fama and French, for that. Most modern managers use a very broad set of measures, but price to book, It's probably the most susceptible to being warped by intangible values.”
Asness: Personal cynicism delayed AQR's machine learning adoption by years
“I think I probably slowed us down on some of the machine learning stuff by a couple years with a little cynicism along the lines of exactly what you're talking about, that we could turn over more of the decision to the machines.”
Asness: Multi-manager pod shop model completely defied his past intuition
“If you had told me 20 years ago that here's my strategy, I'm gonna go find people I think are really good at this, Pay them a lot. Charge that to the underlying investor. So the fees are, when you add it all up, are gigantic. And then I'm going to fire them ra…”
Asness: AQR trades crypto exclusively via small trend-following positions
“The most extreme example I'll give you is there's a one place in our entire business. We trade crypto, pure trend following strategies in places that we have a broader model where we're doing macro that is valuation carry doesn't have any of those, or at least…”
Asness: Investment committee members face asymmetric downside risk with no upside
“Individual members of the committee get far more punished for disasters than they get for good portfolio returns. That's true in a lot of walks of investing. I think it's particularly true of committees where they don't own anything, they don't get the upside,…”
The other half of the tape: Cliff Asness's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 28 times in 17 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 12Patrick O'Shaughnessy 4Leigh Drogen 4Matt Whineray 2Shannon O'Leary 1Michael Mauboussin 1Kip McDaniel 1Jon Glidden 1
Statements about Cliff Asness, by other people (2)
Hamilton: Allocators shouldn't disqualify managers like Cliff Asness over politics
“What kind of society are we if we, like, shut him out, or somehow think that, you know, we can't invest with him or his team just because of his views? I just, I find that to be completely ridiculous. I mean, obviously, if he laundered money, right, you can't,…”
Drogen: Starkiller models its investment approach on AQR and Tiger Global
“We try and pattern ourselves off of some mix of AQR and Tiger Global, and I think he's done it right, and he's taken his lumps along the way sometimes, but Times like this, he gets to come back and say, Hey, look, you know, the process works.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 28
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Patrick O'Shaughnessy – O'Shaughnessy Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.01)
- Matt Whineray – Leading New Zealand Super Fund (Capital Allocators, EP.108)
- Michael Mauboussin – Who's on the Other Side (Capital Allocators, EP.99)
- Kip McDaniel – How to Get an Allocator's Attention (Capital Allocators, EP.115)
- Jen Prosek – Branding an Asset Management Firm (Capital Allocators, EP.81)
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Cliff's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & CIO, AQR Capital Management | 1 | 24 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |