15th Annual Wharton Investement Management Conference
Keynotes
Morning Keynote
Jonathan Steinberg is the Founder and CEO of WisdomTree Investments, Inc. (NASDAQ: WETF), the fastest-growing publicly traded asset manager in 2013 with $31 Billion in assets at September 30th, and the only public company focused exclusively on Exchange Traded Funds. Jonathan will share his views on the future of ETFs and the broader asset management industry, as well as some personal lessons in leadership, business and entrepreneurship.
Jonathan Steinberg
CEO
WisdomTree
Jonathan L. Steinberg is the founder of WisdomTree Investments, Inc. where he has served as CEO since October 1998, and as CEO and President since August 2012. Mr. Steinberg has been a member of WisdomTree’s Board of Directors since October 1988, serving as Chairman of the Board from October 1988 to November 2004. Together with WisdomTree’s Head of Sales & Chief Investment Strategist, Luciano Siracusano, he is responsible for the creation and development of the company’s proprietary index methodology.
Mr. Steinberg served as Editor-in-Chief of Individual Investor and Ticker magazines, and is the author of Midas Investing, published by Random House, Inc. Prior to founding WisdomTree, Mr. Steinberg was an analyst from 1986 to 1988 in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department of Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. He attended The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Midday Keynote
John Liew will tell the story of AQR, a global investment firm built at the nexus of financial theory and practical application. From the firm’s academic roots at the University of Chicago and the inception of the Quantitative Research Group at Goldman Sachs, to the founding of AQR in 1998 and its evolution into the firm it is today, John will share both the highs and lows, and a few of the lessons learned along the way.
John M. Liew, Ph.D.
Founding Principal
AQR
John, a co-founder of AQR, heads the Global Asset Allocation team, overseeing the research, portfolio management and trading associated with that strategy. Prior to AQR, he worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co. as a portfolio manager in the Asset Management Division where he developed and managed quantitative trading strategies. He began his career at Trout Trading, developing quantitative market-neutral stock-selection strategies. John has published articles in the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal, and has received the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy award and the Graham and Dodd award for his articles. John is a member of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees and sits on the university’s investment committee. He earned a B.A. in economics, an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in finance from Chicago.
Closing Keynote
Sassan Alizadeh, Ph.D. is a Managing Director of Highbridge Capital Management and Portfolio Manager for the Global Macro Group. Dr. Alizadeh will share insights from his career in systematic and quantitative trading and his experience in hedge fund and commodity investing.
Sassan Alizadeh, Ph.D.
Managing Director
Highbridge Capital Management
Dr. Alizadeh is a Managing Director of Highbridge Capital Management (HCM) and Portfolio Manager for the Global Macro Group. He has over 20 years of experience in systematic and quantitative trading. Dr. Alizadeh began his career as the first Manager of Research at Quantitative Financial Strategies where he helped to develop and implement proprietary trading strategies. For six years starting in 1994, he was a proprietary trader at Bear Stearns where he traded several different systematic and quantitative strategies. He later joined Parametric Capital Management as head of Futures Trading where he implemented and traded a currency and commodity global macro model before joining HCM in April 2003. Dr. Alizadeh has a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Tufts University, an M.B.A. from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He currently is an Adjunct Professor of Finance in the Masters of Financial Engineering program at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Additionally, Dr. Alizadeh has performed academic research in various areas of finance and co-authored and published, as lead paper in the Journal of Finance, an article in the area of stochastic volatility estimation and its ramifications in the foreign currency markets. This work also was awarded first prize at the Wharton School’s Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research for “Outstanding Working Paper in Investment Research for 2001”.