Cliff Asness

Clifford Scott Asness (; born October 17, 1966) is an American hedge fund manager and the co-founder of AQR Capital Management. As of October 2025, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$2.9 billion.

Early life and education Asness was born to a Jewish family in Queens, New York, the son of Carol, who ran a medical education firm, and Barry Asness, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan who was a former Golden Gloves boxer. His family moved to Roslyn Heights, New York, when he was four. He attended the B'nai B'rith Perlman Camp, and graduated from the public Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, New York.

In 1988, Asness graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received a bachelor's degree with a double major in computer science and finance as part of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology (M&T). At Chicago, Asness was the teaching assistant (TA) for his dissertation adviser, Nobel laureate Eugene Fama — and the economist, Kenneth French, who were both influential and widely respected empirical financial economists, had established the foundations of their Fama–French three-factor model in 1992. Fama and French had contrasted value stocks with growth stocks. Since Fama and French's inception of value stocks, "quants have designed algorithms that can scour market data" looking for "factors". Asness worked as GSAM manager until 1997, when he and some members of the GSAM team left to start their own quantitative hedge fund.

When the $10 million initial investment reached $100 million, Goldman opened the fund to the public—the Goldman Sachs Global Alpha Fund. By 2007, at its height, Global Alpha was "one of the biggest and best performing hedge funds in the world" with more than $12 billion assets under management (AUM). Global Alpha was shut down in the fall of 2011.

AQR Capital Management In 1998, Asness, David Kabiller, John Liew, and Robert Krail, co-founded Applied Quantitative Research (AQR) Capital Management, a "quantitative hedge fund firm." An October 2010 Bloomberg article described AQR as a "quantitative investment firm" that used "algorithms and computerized models to trade stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities." AQR's $28 million loan would be forgiven if AQR kept "540 jobs within Connecticut" and created 600 new jobs by 2016. The fund will focus on niche strategies, including temperature arbitrage. In their 2003 publication in the Financial Analysts Journal, Arnott and Asness wrote that contrary to prevailing theory, companies that paid higher dividends, actually had higher growth in earnings. They found that low payout ratios "preceded low earnings growth."

In a 2013 co-authored article published in The Journal of Finance, Asness, Tobias Moskowitz, and Lasse Pedersen found "consistent value and momentum return premia across eight diverse markets and asset classes, and a strong common factor structure among their returns." Since this strategy for accumulation is subject to the same constraints as any other and systemic effects in markets can invalidate it: AQR and other similar ventures lost massive amounts of wealth in the 2008 financial crisis with assets declining from $39 billion in 2007 to $17 billion by the end of 2008.

Publications about Asness

The New York Times published a profile of Asness on June 5, 2005. The Times said that "what Asness really does is try to understand the relationship between risk and reward." along with Aaron Brown from AQR Capital Management, Ken Griffin from Chicago's Citadel LLC, James Simons from Renaissance Technologies, and Boaz Weinstein from Deutsche Bank. a "scourge of bad practices in the money management industry" with the "intellectual chops to back up his attacks". Patterson said that Asness was known as "one of the smartest investors in the world." He had been a "standout student at the University of Chicago's prestigious economics department in the early 1990s, then a star at Goldman Sachs in the mid-1990s before branching out on his own in 1998 to launch AQR with $1 billion and change, a near record at the time." and other television programs. He has frequently spoken out against high hedge fund fees. In particular, he has been critical of hedge funds with high correlations to equity markets, delivering stock index fund performance (which is available cheaply) at prices that could only be justified by extraordinary market insight that only the best hedge funds seem to deliver consistently. In a 2010 The Wall Street Journal op-ed (written with Aaron Brown) he claimed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill would lead to regulatory capture, crony capitalism and a massive "financial-regulatory complex." In Bloomberg columns, he discussed taxation of investment managers and healthcare reform. He posts commentary on financial issues, generally from a libertarian and efficient markets viewpoint.

In an unpublished 2000 paper, "Bubble Logic," Asness criticized "nonsensical" and "unsustainable stock prices" that caused the stock market tech bubble of 1999–2000. In a special 60th anniversary edition of The Financial Analysts Journal he said that this was also the fifth anniversary of the stock bubble peak, he repeated his criticisms the tech bubble and those who claimed options should not be expensed.

He was also known as an outspoken critic of U.S. president Barack Obama. Two tracts he authored protest the Obama administration's treatment of Chrysler senior bondholders.

In 2012, he was included in the 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets magazine.

In 2013, Asness was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.

In 2023, Asness declared he would no longer donate to his alma mater University of Pennsylvania due to their hosting the Palestine Writes festival, and what he called a “drift away from true freedom of thought, expression and speech.”

Personal life In 1999, Asness married Laurel Elizabeth Fraser of Seward, Nebraska, the daughter of a retired Methodist pastor.